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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2842 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Asking here because I don't have the time to effort-post enough to post in the main thread.

Does anyone know of manifestos or books with worldviews and principles which have weight to them? Most I can find is half-assed disinterested knowledge. There's too much beating around the bush, self-censorship and conforming. I did enjoyed reading Ted's manifesto and "Setting the record straight". Max Stirner's takes and Julius Evola's books are good too. I don't care which ideology people believe in, it's just nice seeing somebody actually believe in something. And lets be honest, fragile beliefs are mediocre.

Alternatively, share any strong beliefs of your own, some of you must be tired of walking on egg-shells by now. I'll start:

All the suffering you'll ever experience does not add up to much of a big deal. Only the lack of meaningful experiences is a problem. The focus on reducing bad things rather than causing good things is a symptom of illness.

Most modern "sexualities" are mere fetishism and trauma responses. Also, 98% of modern psychologists are utterly incompetent and most common psych knowledge is wrong. Is nobody else concerned that even art styles are getting domestication syndrome?

In-group favorism, gatekeeping, discrimination and all the like is all based, as long as none of it is done "in bad taste". Corruption, manipulation, finding loopholes and other such indirect, cunning, malicious and exploitative mindsets is done by those who lack the strength to compete fairly, making them inferior. Also, no favoritism, support or bias requires malice onto the excluded in the first place. Society has a habit of making the worst examples of things out to be the standard (which is also why it demonizes the ego)

Every culture should be respected and left to do its own thing. If the culture turns out well, then it cannot be called immoral. If it does not turn out well, then foreign aid and other attempts to save it would be immoral.

All virtue is costly and one must have abundance in order to be a good person without destroying themselves, and it's a sad to see good people destroy themselves.

Trans-humanists are better described as anti-humanists. If you love something then you don't seek to escape it or to change it into something else. Video-game modding sometimes makes games better with 'more of the same' and I find this to be acceptable (hence my username).

You can't have the good without the bad, and if you reduce one you reduce both. Taken to an extreme, the desire to decrease the bad leads to nihilism or a preference for non-existence. (Buddhism and statements like 'the only moral action is to destroy the universe'). Even psychological defense mechanisms which protect against pain tend to do so in ways which reduce the good parts of life (inaction, detachment, avoidance, etc).

Most conscious interference with the goal of improving something will end in failure, and Chesterton's fence is not the full explanation. Perhaps you can sometimes aid something without attempting to control it, and lessen the chances of failure. But as a general rule, just let things go their way and they will solve themselves.

Weird ask, but I got into a discussion with a friend, and the topic of HBD got brought up. Now I never really paid attention to it when it was discussed, here and the before and the before before. It just really wasn't interesting to me to dig into. But he has never heard of it and wants the studies that get cited by HBDers (He is more interested on population level differences and whether that means we should treat people differently).

I know around here it is approximately a stable-ish state, so would anyone drop some links from their old argument folders that I can pass along?

Short version for the question is, in essence, no we generally do not need to treat actual people directly differently (especially for people where you don't know their ancestry beyond the visibly obvious, and even for those the variance per person is still usually larger than the population level genetic differences, though there are some notable excemptions), but we also simply shouldn't expect different groups to exhibit the same mean for many traits even given identical environments. The big problem here is especially affirmative action, which lifts people visibly beyond their competence levels into positions they're unsuited for.

There are multiple substacks that write a lot about topics in this space. One of my favorite HBDer is Razib Khan, who is writing almost exclusively about population genetics. There is also a community of heterodox scientists which frequently publish together on HBD and all run their own substacks: Emil Kirkegaard, Peter Frost, Seb Jensen, Meng Hu, Davide Piffer. Several also write in the hub Aporia, which also includes a good entry point.

variance per person is still usually larger than the population level genetic differences, though there are some notable excemptions

Depends on trait. One could Lewontinize any neutral SNP which does nothing. But for traits that matter, between Sub-saharan Africans and NW Europeans about 1.2 SD in IQ and that's a lot, between Ashkenazi and pygmies nearly 3 SD. Similarly, difference in extraversion is large

I think the general topic of our discussion was that he was advocating for treating actual people differently, I was not. He has a strong moral distaste for certain historical positions, to which I pointed out if HBD is even slightly true, the downstream effect of his positions, would lead directly to the historical ideas he so loathes. He had never heard of HBD, and I didn't have the the necessary repository of information to give him an in depth highlight more than the surface level: Traits are inherited across different ethnic groups leading to a distribution between groups.

I wanted to attempt to fix that.

Here's a compendium of a bunch of different articles and papers about HBD: https://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/

Richard Lynn's work is one good starting point. It has been quite a while since I have gone down the HBD rabbit hole though, it's one of those topics that eventually got tiresome to argue about. Talking to some blank slate proponents feels like arguing with a young earth creationist, no matter how good the evidence is, they will find a way to make a "god of the gaps" style argument for nurture, education, or whatever.

This is useful thank you! Low chance he'll actually read it my it's nice to have a repo of links.

I'd check Charles Murrey, https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Charles-Murray-2043206149.

Thanks! The names Charles Murray and Steven Sailor are the two I remember at the moment. Are you aware of any others?

By now that claim about smartphones passively listening in 24/7 for ad targeting is quite old. Any conclusive evidence either for or against?

I've had a bunch of "weird" occurrences like discussing some thing with my wife that we haven't ever mentioned before and suddenly we start getting ads about this exactly subject, but I can't call it a conclusive evidence, as it could be either of us looked up something related before or during talking about it and just forgot about it. I'm pretty sure it's not too hard to make a clean experiment if one wanted to, but I am too lazy to do anything like that.

IDK, but when I’ve been speaking Spanish a bunch I get a ton of ads for soccer.

Another anecdote: I started getting ads for divorce attorneys on my work computer shortly after posting this from home.

They are passively monitoring, but not listening.

They have permissions for location, gyro, website activity (facebook pixel) and know who you interact with. That's more than good enough to serve you ads. Hell, they're stronger signals for your interests than your audio.

My cousin works for Verizon and says no. He says that what's going on is that Facebook is just showing you the same ads as your friends, which could happen if they search for something you were talking about and you don't. There's selection bias here, too; nobody accounts for all the times they talked about something and weren't shown an ad for it.

So this was my stance for the longest time, but I've had a few instances like the following that are just too suspicious:

I do not have Facebook on my phone. I was talking to someone at work whose number I do not have, he was talking about the problems in a vacation destination I have never gone to in a country I was last in before Facebook existed, I was not considering going there so I had not been googling anything about it (we were talking about it because of a patient mentioning it), he was not considering going there either, just explaining that he thought it was ass.

Then when I went home I got advertisements for hotel rooms in that city. I do not regularly get hotel advertisements.

Facebook shouldn't have had anything to cue off of.

Presumably Facebook knows my phone number, detected it in proximity to his phone number, and served a targeted ad. It's possible that he furiously googling the place afterwards and it served similar ads to people in his phone book and people with recent text messages etc but that's nearly just as bad.

Facebook shouldn't have had anything to cue off of.

Except the data that the FB / Messenger app transmitted, whatever sites had FB pixel, anything you accessed (voluntarily or in the background) that communicates with FB and so on.

There is simply no mechanism for the FB app to listen to the microphone of your phone because the phone OS just won't stream audio to it unless explicitly enabled (including the visible indicator etc). To do that FB would have to abuse a zero day exploit in the phone OS for years without anyone catching on.

OK thanks for this because I was convinced they were listening to me after an incident. My friend is a whiskey snob and wanted to try this one specific whiskey, but only one bar in town was serving it and it was too much money to justify buying a whole bottle. So he took me there and we mentioned the brand a bunch and the next day I got ads for it. I was absolutely paranoid about it because I had never heard of this alcohol before and couldn't think of any way the algorithm would have decided to target me beyond listening to my phone. My friend looking it up and facebook making a connection makes way more sense.

The amount of data and effort it would require to a. constantly be passively listening and recording and b. uploading and analyzing it is simply too vast to be a workable conspiracy (at this point, anyways). It would simultaneously be too noticeable and not worth the cost.

The conspiracies you have to worry about are those that would be inconspicuous, simple, and easily-automated. Odds are you are far too unimportant to warrant active monitoring.

Modern operating systems inform you when the microphone is on. This claim requires that Facebook et al have a backdoor that's never been detected in all these years.

The FB pixel localhost sidechannel exfiltration got caught within a year or so, but the researchers that found it realized that Yandex had been using a similar technique for 7 years without getting caught.

That was a clever use of Internet permissions, which were requested by the apps, rather than a covert usage of permissions that the apps weren't supposed to have. There's a difference between using a permission creatively and using a permission that you're not supposed to have.

Does this difference actually matter? 99.99% of users will click "allow" on any permission a "trusted" app (like facebook or browser) would ask them for, and would never realize any of those deep technical aspects.

If you've got a green microphone chip in your notifications bar because Facebook is listening to you, then it's not really a mystery if Facebook is listening to you or not and this conversation would be over.

However, this doesn't happen and nobody has produced an explanation of how it could happen without the OS notifying the user that the microphone is enabled.

Nobody checks any notifications bars when your phone is in your pocket or sitting on your table. A tiny green dot is hard to miss. Also, I am not entirely convinced there's no way to turn on the microphone (hardware) without showing the green dot (software). It's be very easy to lay all these doubt to rest - make a hardware microphone mute switch, that physically (electrically) disconnects the microphone hardware. I'd trust that. Nobody does it though.

Nobody checks any notifications bars when your phone is in your pocket or sitting on your table.

On Android, apps can't turn on the microphone at all while running in the background. Accessing it while running in the foreground requires a permanent notification while the foreground process is running. To start a background process, the app must be open, so it can't start a background process while the phone is at rest.

In any case, Android maintains an audit log of all microphone accesses. It would, again, be trivial for people to demonstrate that the Facebook app is accessing the mic while the phone is locked or at rest. Somehow, nobody has produced such evidence.

A tiny green dot is hard to miss.

I agree it's hard to miss, especially because (at least on Android) everything in the notification bar is monochrome (except I guess a low battery indicator).

Also, I am not entirely convinced there's no way to turn on the microphone (hardware) without showing the green dot (software).

This is the second time this week that someone has responded to my comment with an objection that I already covered in a grandparent.

This claim requires that Facebook et al have a backdoor that's never been detected in all these years.

I expect not reading from plebbit but I feel the bare minimum of engagement on this forum should be reading the conversation you are joining.

It's especially perplexing since you thought I was talking about granting microphone permissions at first, but somehow that's not a load bearing part of your argument and your confidence that I'm wrong seems unaffected.

It's be very easy to lay all these doubt to rest - make a hardware microphone mute switch, that physically (electrically) disconnects the microphone hardware. I'd trust that.

Hmm, so you don't trust the microphone notification because you're not able to look at your notification bar, but you do trust a switch which may not do anything (when's the last time you disassembled your phone?) and that might get switched while your phone is in your pocket. Let's say, that's not a typical perspective among consumers.

you don't trust the microphone notification because you're not able to look at your notification bar

No, I don't trust the notification because I don't see any mechanism that prevents microphone from working while not displaying the notification, those are completely different systems, and the only thing linking them is software. Which is extremely fallible. If I break the electric circuit, I'd trust the laws of physics to prevent the microphone from working.

This claim requires that Facebook et al have a backdoor that's never been detected in all these years.

Doesn't have to be Facebook, could be google feeding some data into one of a myriad of data aggregators, and ad platforms just using the end result of that.

a switch which may not do anything

That's become known pretty quickly I imagine, it's not hard to open it and verify, I opened my phones several times despite being complete ignoramus in electronics. And it's easy to prove too, so for a phone manufacturer going through all the expense of making a fake switch would be pointless, especially given as phone manufacturers aren't those who profit from ads. OTOH, phone manufacturers do not control the software, and making fallible software is cheaper than making secure one.

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Why would you trust the Phone OS to set the electronic switch off (a physical switch isn't possible) if you don't trust the same OS to not route audio to the app without your permission?

Why a physical switch isn't possible? Looks like very basic thing, just interrupt the circuit.

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Broad question:

Who is worth rooting for?

I mean, what humans alive right now represent "the best of humanity" without some laundry list of skeletons in their closet.

Someone who has talent, charisma and, critically, an unimpeachable moral character. A 'wholesome' sheen is optional but not necessary.

To compare and contrast, the models (limiting it to celebrities) I have in my head when I think of this are guys like Mr. Rogers, Dolly Parton, Weird Al Yankovic, Steve Irwin, Robin Williams, and maybe Keanu Reeves.

And contrasting examples where they cultivated but didn't live up to the image: Billy Cosby, Ellen DeGeneres, Will Smith, Ashton Kutcher. (I'm not pretending their behaviors are equivalent, mind).

I've talked in the past about how so many 'role models' failed to live up to their hype. Here, though, I'm talking about something even more basic. Not necessarily someone you want to be like but someone who you want to see succeed because the virtue of their goals and their character is so 'pure' that its inherently inspiring.

Someone who makes you think "I want this guy to do well, I want him to win, I want him to overcome every single obstacle he ever encounters" because that person's success would restore your faith in humanity as a whole.

This question partially inspired by all the memes around PewDiePie literally winning at life and nobody can level an actual critique of his character. Yes, we all know about the bridge incident, that's almost the proof positive that he'd stored up such large reserves of goodwill that people implicitly understand he's a heckin' decent human being. Jontron also seems to have his his happy ending. Isaac Arthur is one for me, personally, but for my more narrow interests.

Is there anyone currently coming up through the ranks that seems to represent this semi-heroic archetype?

The problem is the "morally unimpeachable" requirement. The only way to gain this attribute is to avoid doing anything of real substance.

Disagree, although I see the point. Most 'great men' commit some acts which would be considered atrocities if they didn't 'win.'

Would Scott count? I'm sure he needs no introduction in these parts, and if he does, then lurk moar.

He's got a pretty squeaky clean image, and is definitely charismatic (over text), and I think he's made a meaningful impact on the world. This site, at the very least, owes its existence to him. The closest thing to controversial in his life was the drama over his ex's new husband leaking emails where he gave HBD more credence than he had done publicly, and to his credit, he's expressed support. So yeah, I don't know anyone who really has anything bad to say about him, and I think he deserves his success.

I root for Scott, I'm just not sure what projects he's a working on that I can wish him success with.

He did contribute to that "AGI 2027" paper/site which is getting some flack now, but I don't think any less of him.

One underrated aspect of books/articles/etc. is that they can give you something to argue against. Say what you will about the accuracy or the eloquence of its arguments, AI 2027 does make claims, and they are coherent enough to argue against. It may be a low bar, but it's one that so many commentators fail to reach.

Generally speaking, I will never, ever fault somebody for putting their beliefs up for scrutiny, when they've actually made their arguments clear and aren't ignoring inconvenient data or hiding that they have a pecuniary interest in making you believe what they're saying.

Its admirable specifically because people will ignore that it was a well reasoned, researched, and even-handed prediction about a topic of great uncertainty, and will mock it for getting details wrong while still being mostly right directionally. You take a risk to your status to try and elucidate the topic for everyone. Sure beats people trying to obsfuscate as a status play.

The thing that gets me is that OF COURSE every single AI company is actively trying to create an AGI. Whether that is what they admit or they even expect to achieve it seems irrelevant, they're acting in ways that would bring it about, and bring it at the fastest pace they can achieve.

I'd love to see someone as smart and persuasive write the definitive "AGI Never" paper, predicting when capabilities will plateau and never improve, with falsifiable metrics to compare over time. I just do not think there's an argument that can do so successfully.

I think you're looking for role models in entirely the wrong industries. The only reason we scrutinise the character of entertainers like Ellen DeGeneres, PewDiePie or Will Smith is because their job is to be liked and their worth is almost entirely parasocial, and if they fail to appear "wholesome heckin' good human beings", they fail at their job.

But if someone actually significantly contributes to humanity, then them having an unimpeachable moral character is pretty unimportant. If Norman Borlaug cheated on his wife, it wouldn't detract from the fact that he saved over a billion lives from starvation, and if someone who looked to him as inspiration would still go into agricultural science. But if you want to emulate Ellen DeGeneres, well, what's there to be inspired by when the personality is the product? Musicians and actors at least have a separate output, but it's rare that they become celebrities purely on the basis on technical talent.

I personally think it's a societal failure that people look to YouTube streamers as people to emulate as opposed to scientists, engineers, doctors, etc. It feels cheap to call a guy who talks while playing video games in the comfort of his own home a hero, or even a semi-hero, when there's doctors risking life and limb to save lives in literal war zones. And if you want someone to emulate just because they have a good personality, look to people around you that you know personally, not celebrities of whom you know nothing about except their media image and some rumours.

I personally think it's a societal failure that people look to YouTube streamers as people to emulate as opposed to scientists, engineers, doctors, etc.

This is partially why I would ask this question. I don't know of enough good examples of good people doing good things who we should all be rooting for, outside of the easily visible celebrity space.

It seems to be in no small part that people who have 'good character' simply aren't inclined to seek the spotlight.

It is indeed probably humanity's singular greatest weak spot as a species (yet simultaneously, not really our fault) that the factors that confer high status amongst fellow humans is not well-aligned with what creates the largest material gains for said humans. Capitalism is a Kludge that manages to partially solve for hits, in a certain light.

First person that comes to mind is Thomas Massie. The guy resonates with me on many levels and I do see him as a role model. His life story of making it as a successful electrical engineer, going back to homesteading a piece of land with an off-grid house he built himself and being one of the few politicians that I know of that seems to genuinely not have sacrificed his personal integrity.

Beyond that I would say Terence Tao absolutely deserves any and all recognition. But honestly, picking a celebrity, I have a bit of trouble. I guess gut feeling I'll also pick Whitney Webb as one of the best reporters on Epstein and his networks.

I root against streamers. I think people (myself included) should go outside more and be on screens less. Additionally I think Europeans, from countries other than the UK and the Ireland, who post on platforms like YouTube in English and are doing a grave disservice to their own national cultures and languages.

I am continually praying I wake up one day to hear that Twitch had to shut down as its business model proved unworkable and its popularity collapsed.

There's been a spate of drama in the livestream world for the past few months of relatively popular streamers being utterly horrible people. Car accidents while livestreaming, physical and mental abuse inflicted on vulnerable people, open sexual assault or shoplifting on stream.

This does little to impact their popularity, because the drama is the point.

I would be just fine taking a page out of South Korea's playbook and throw them in jail if they can't behave.

Or a more American solution, shoot the more annoying ones.

I really think that all countries should just deny entry to any Kick streamer at the border. Sure you'll be getting false positives, but it does seem about as bad as having a criminal record.

Or a more American solution, shoot the more annoying ones.

Should they be drug out into the street first?

Intellectually I really like Nate Hagens and Erald Kolasi on the energy front. I feel like both of them are genuinely trying to find a way that humans can flourish and make it through our current list of challenges.

In sport, I like a lot of what I'm seeing out of Norwegian triathlon (Kristian Blumenfelt, Gustav Iden, etc.) and Nils van Der Pol (speed skating olympic champion and world record holder).

Based on an exchange in the main thread, I've been reminded by how different some of the views I hold on technological progress are from the rest of this forum (and I suppose society in general). I don't think we will ever colonize space (and have started to view people who take space colonization seriously in a negative light), AI will be an expensive nothinburger, and we will spend our lives in an environment of declining energy availability and increasing ecological catastrophe. I'm not full doomer by any means, but I find the vague nature that many on the forum treat the material basis of our reality to be baffling. One of the best and most palatable speakers I find on this topic is Nate Hagens and his Great Simplification podcast. Every week he has a variety of guests on the show that deal with various aspects of our predicament, many of whom strongly disagree with him. I would really recommend that almost everyone here check him out.

What views do you hold that you feel are orthogonal to most people on this forum (or society at large)? Who is the best speaker/writer that you feel like captures your point of view?

If AI will be a nothingburger, then space colonization is probably inevitable, for certain definitions of "inevitable". Natural selection and civilization have this weird back-and-forth, where the scales of problems that need solving to make civilization-scale advances, and the conditions to maintain population growth long-term, often wind up clashing, so advances come in bursts, followed by declines, with the seat of innovation having to move to a new population with each iteration. The current paradigm seems to be in the bust phase of that cycle. So if "we" means "The West", yeah, probably screwed. But we've raised the waterline such that India is landing probes on the Moon, China is exploring Mars, Japan is returning asteroid samples, and Israel and Yemen are having the first space combat on the technicality that their missiles collided above the Carman line.

More likely, I think, is that the utter insanity of the past two centuries will necessarily come to a more stable form, whereever the seat of advancement winds up, and that will take a while. The current space exploration efforts better resemble Julius Caesar failing to invade Britain, then 2000 years later, the Sun never set on the British Empire. It's just that, instead of naked blue Celts in chariots forcing back the greatest army on Earth, it was economics and ideology and gravity ... defeating the greatest airforce on Earth. Someone will overcome fertility collapse, because Natural Selection works that way. Someone, perhaps much later, will take the Moon and NEAs, because if they don't, life ends here, not just civilization. And, had I to guess, they will, as their spiritual ancestors did, have a spectacular boom period that raises the civilization waterline for everyone else, succumb to decadence and unsustainability, nearly crash civilization for a while, only to be replaced another few centuries later with someone who goes even farther.

The fun part is, this works on the scale of centuries and millennia. So if AI doesn't pan out, there's plenty of time to get it right before the Sun, a giant space-rock, or some other cosmic catastrophe gets us RFEd. If AI turns out to be the big game-changer of this iteration of the civilizational musical chairs game, then it's anyone's guess what comes next, because whatever it is, it happens in the next few decades to a century or two.

The current space exploration efforts better resemble Julius Caesar failing to invade Britain

Ok look, he was kissing the ground as he came ashore. He did NOT trip and eat shit on the beach in an inauspicious sign that his hubris was disfavored by the gods. The very fact that that you are insinuating this makes me think that you are a butthurt Gallic shill poster working out of a boiler room in some mud hut in Lugdunum. Opinion disregarded.

IDK, things in Britain might look different now if there were 10k naked blue charioteers running around, so you might have a point...

See this is why I can't take space colonization advocates seriously anymore: you're extrapolating from trends on earth that have no real analogy in space. Colonizing space looks absolutely nothing like either the British Empire or Julius Caesar invading Britain because in both of those scenarios the various groups involved don't have to bring every single thing they need for their survival with them. There's just no real pressing reason to go to space: there's nothing super valuable we could get there that we can't get on earth for much cheaper (filtering sea water is probably cheaper than asteroid mining), if we really needed living space, seasteads or even colonies on Antartica would be far easier to supply and to make self-sufficient, yet we have done neither.

There are just certain things that are physically impossible and/or biologically impossible that will never come to pass. No one "has to" colonize space. We have no evidence of extraterrestrial space colonization (the Fermi paradox isn't a paradox if space colonization isn't biologically possible). You are giving evolution far too much credit. There are some boundaries that have never been crossed here on Earth in 4.2 billion years of life existing, there's no reason to think that life would necessarily be able to make it into space and expand throughout the universe. This is more of a reflection of our Faustian culture rather than of how life actually works. Life can just end with the sun evaporating the oceans on earth, and that's probably what will happen.

Current space exploration efforts are almost entirely the result of the one time fossil fuel burst we had as a civilization. We still haven't returned to the moon since the 70s, and the ISS was built in the early 2000s. We haven't made serious attempts at space colonization, other than a few probes, since Apollo. Yes SpaceX has made great strides in increasing efficiency and decreasing launch costs, but the vast vast majority of those launches are for satellites, not humans because there aren't actually that many reasons to go to space.

Resource extraction for Earth is an utterly terrible reason to colonize space, and I don't know why anyone would take it seriously. You don't colonize the Moon and asteroids for gold; you do it because of how differently things work in space. Because there are things that you can do with satellites and space stations and space factories that you either can't do on Earth, or can do more efficiently in space if the cost of working there came down a couple orders of magnitude. Colonizing other planets is a sideshow for the next million or billion years or so.

But when I'm talking about natural selection, I mean the people who are super pessimistic have a tendency to be evolutionary deadends, as do the people who are overly optimistic and burn through resources too quickly. More than just genes get selected for through attrition. Apollo was unsustainable, and Artimas looks like it's just as unsustainable. But the current iteration of Western Civ is unsustainable.

I also feel I should say something about the comment on fossil fuels, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly. It sounds like it's implying that, since fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource and we've burned through most of the easily accessible supply, it's all downhill for Earth in general from here? Because we kinda already used all that fossil fuel wealth to develop workarounds, albeit they are harder or more costly. But they are also workarounds that many non-Western nations have invested in the foundational tech and infrastructure for. If you have effective alternative energy sources, you have alternative means of accessing hydrocarbons if needed. Even if it's not for space, someone in the next Renaissance will look at Millennium texts, think that maybe having these things would be nice, and figure out how to concentrate enough energy to pick up where we left off.

Life can just end with the sun evaporating the oceans on earth, and that's probably what will happen.

Jesus Christ as if my "lying in bed at midnight Sunday scariest" weren't bad enough already

Why? You’ll be dead and humans probably won’t exist anymore, or have existed for millions of years

Speaking of Christ, the first job God gives to Man in Genesis is tending Eden. The next job that wasn't a curse was to be fruitful and multiply. So it could be argued that People of the Book are religiously obligated to preserve life until God says otherwise.

Hell, if we want to get extra Unsong brained, Revelation includes a plague wherein the Sun does start to roast the Earth, and after Armageddon a cube city with enough space for everyone and its own power / water / food supply descends from the sky and starts exporting medicine and raining fire on attackers. So that's ... fun?

... Do I really want to post something this off-the-wall after trying to be serious in the rest of this thread? Especially since Revelation also includes a scene where a trio of Satanic Kaijuu spit demon-frogs from their mouths to start the Battle of Armageddon? ... Why does the Bible have a Gainax ending?

we will spend our lives in an environment of declining energy availability and increasing ecological catastrophe

We've had the answer to this since the discovery of nuclear fission, we just gaslight ourselves into pretending we don't by regulating it off the board and saying "it just isn't profitable 🤷‍♂️"

Amusingly, the West may finally come to its senses on this matter as it's under threat of losing the entire game board to China. Civilisational suicide would be totally cool in a vacuum, but when there's a rival, it looks like you're just coping for losing, rather than virtuously killing yourself, which is totally not cool.

Tangentially, this is why I view fusion as basically irrelevant: if we get fusion, we'll just make that illegal, too.

I'm not sure I believe that regulation is the reason why we don't have fission. US has more fission power by GW than China and so does France. France's electricity mix is actually 70% fission and is dealing with various climate change related problems such as being unable to run the reactors in the summer because the water level is so low in the various inflow rivers to the nuclear power plants can't be used for steam generation. Even with a government that doesn't give a shit about safety regulations (China and the Soviet Union) fission clearly actually isn't that effective of a technology. Fission has actually declined as a share of China's energy mix recently (probably because of build out of solar), so I have a hard time believing it is a wunderkind energy source. @FirmWeird has posted a lot about this in this in the past.

being unable to run the reactors in the summer because the water level is so low in the various inflow rivers to the nuclear power plants can't be used for steam generation

I roll to disbelieve that this is a real problem rather than something like "French law says that there's a temperature limit on the water you can discharge into the river and one single summer during a heatwave all of the water in the river for one plant was already at that temperature so that particular nuclear plant was legally disallowed from using river water for cooling for 2 days".

Reactors could well be designed to run off of colder water than was available. Naively it should have been fine- most of the energy in cooling is used to boil the water rather than heat it up- but euros like to engineer things to have really tight tolerances for some reason.

I have, and I have eaten numerous downvotes for it. My point has always been that nuclear energy has too low an EROEI to be a viable answer to the energy needs of a modern industrial society, and I haven't seen any convincing evidence to the contrary. France's nuclear system was only viable because they got their uranium for cents on the franc from Nigeria, and even then it ran out of money and had to be restructured when I was posting about it last. This doesn't necessarily mean that there's no place for nuclear power - having a source of power that isn't reliant on fossil fuels could prove to be particularly useful in a future where fossil fuels are harder to come boy or the Middle East is in a state of war. Similarly, nuclear submarines which don't actually have to make enough money to justify their continued existence but place a huge emphasis on the density of their energy source are another good use for them. If China actually manages to get those molten salt reactors working, that would be fantastic as well. But right now I haven't seen any convincing evidence that nuclear power is a sustainable answer to the depletion of fossil fuels - and a large graveyard of failed attempts.

having a source of power that isn't reliant on fossil fuels could prove to be particularly useful in a future where fossil fuels are harder to come boy or the Middle East is in a state of war

This is the reason why France has the nuclear system it does- it was de Gaulle's baby precisely because the US doesn't have French (or European) interests at heart. France was under [his] military dictatorship at the time, which helped get things moving.

He was right, of course; both in 1973 with the US-caused oil shortage and then in 2022 with the US-caused LNG shortage.

place a huge emphasis on the density of their energy source are another good use for them

It's not so much that as it is completely obviating the need to resupply with fuel. And, especially relevant for submarines, nuclear power functions even with a complete lack of oxygen, so doing that is a no-brainer.

I haven't seen any convincing evidence that nuclear power is a sustainable answer to the depletion of fossil fuels

It's the only alternative that can work anywhere on the Earth's surface on a calm, cold night. Lighting a fire is the classic method to get energy at that time, but "magic hot rock" is fine too.

I once heard stated that the reason it's difficult to get good output from nuclear is because they simply can't run the reaction hot enough- hence the emphasis on exotic coolants (molten salt, etc.)- whereas with LNG the exhaust heat is sufficiently hot that you can heat the steam driving a secondary turbine to the point where it's very, very efficient. Of course, because we want to reserve the right to quench the reactor if it gets too hot for... certain reasons, we'd like a coolant that doesn't make the problem worse if we do that. At least with LNG you can turn the gas off and the reaction will stop.

I suspect that China’s interest in nuclear power and renewable energy (and coal) are similar to De Gaul’s. China wants a diversified energy portfolio so that they don’t have a single critical failure point built into their economy.

It's the only alternative that can work anywhere on the Earth's surface on a calm, cold night.

"Work" is the key sticking point here - does it provide enough energy to pay for itself? To pay for the extraction of the raw material from the ground, refinement into usable fuel pellets, transportation to the plant, the construction of the plant, the lives of the people who run it and then on top of that provide usable power for the rest of the society that sustains it? The answer is, at present, "No."

That's the entire basis of my objection - even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millenia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment, nuclear just can't pay for itself. Every single existing nuclear program I'm aware of is made viable on the basis of government subsidies or exploitation (i.e. the hilarious prices France paid for Nigerian uranium). Every single proposed nuclear program that doesn't have these problems (fusion, molten salt, thorium, etc) is 20 years in the future, and has been 20 years in the future for the past 60 years.

even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millenia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment

The whole nuclear waste discussion is immensely frustrating to me. Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers. The part that most scares people about radioactive substances is that they can cause injury and death by just being present in their vicinity. However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination. Compare this to detecting chemical contamination, where one could run hundreds of tests and still miss the presence of a lethally toxic substance. Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways. The only reason we even have this discussion with nuclear power is because the physical amount of high level waste is tiny and because it's one of the only energy sources where most of the waste it produces stays neatly contained in a single building.

I don't want to be needlessly antagonistic, but the nuclear waste argument needs to die and whenever anyone brings it up in a discussion I also die a little inside.

Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers.

I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.

However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination.

Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.

Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways.

I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.

I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.

I'm not accusing you of any personal ideological hypocrisy of not being against mining pollution enough. It's just that the theoretical possibility of some post-civilizational-collapse humans being poisoned two hundred years from now, because the concrete box, that we store spent fuel in, eroded away is a laughably insignificant concern. Where are the policy initiatives for deep geological storage of solar panels and solar panel production waste that guarantees no environmental damage for the next X thousand years? Why is nuclear power singled out as the one human activity where we have to spend billions to make sure that no living being in any possible future timeline thousands of years in the future is harmed by some byproduct? Why do we not simply accept that in every country there is one warehouse that requires some minimal continued maintenance effort to remain safe to people in the immediate surroundings? Remember, numerous other such buildings exist right now. Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?

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I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.

If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em. Presumably they're going through some horrible Max Max/Dark Ages thing to have regressed so far, and a bunch of radiation deep underground in the desert is the least of their problems. This is just papier-mache moral grandstanding, hence your need to resort to snark - it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question) to your actual immediate descendants than to prioritize some hypothetical 3035 descendant who finds themselves building a hut in whatever godforsaken place we put a waste dump in.

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China actually started up a molten salt 'thorium' (eg, starting with uranium, then moving to thorium) reactor last year, with the first full thorium cycle this November. I'm not optimistic about its effectiveness, but that's more because it's a lot more complicated than it needs to be, rather than net energy or net cost problems.

A lot of the various cost problems with nuclear plants reflect political willpower, rather than actual material costs. That's most serious in the United States where we've intentionally made them several times harder to produce at the same time that the control and construction technology has gotten much much better, but most western governments have done something similar. (or just had politicians launch rockets directly at the construction sites.)

There's a revealed preferences sense where, if you can't solve those political problems, you can't produce power at price, and it's not entirely wrong. But it's misleading to treat it as a physics problem.

China actually started up a molten salt 'thorium' (eg, starting with uranium, then moving to thorium) reactor last year,

I actually mentioned this in an earlier post. If they can safely generate power with a good EROEI, great!

There's a revealed preferences sense where, if you can't solve those political problems, you can't produce power at price, and it's not entirely wrong. But it's misleading to treat it as a physics problem.

You're right that there's definitely a political aspect holding nuclear power back - the fact that you can't find enough subsaharan africans with degrees in advanced nuclear physics to meet diversity requirements most definitely imposes an additional cost on American/European nuclear power efforts. But some of those policy restrictions are actually extremely sensible and following them imposes lower costs on society as a whole. Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation. Building nuclear reactors on earthquake fault lines is in fact a bad idea, as is building them in floodplains or directly next to the sea. Your nuclear reactor should also be built to rigorous construction standards rather than relying on cheap contractors who half-arse everything and replace a bunch of structural cement with styrofoam to reduce construction costs.

Do all of those regulations impose additional costs? Absolutely. But at the same time, they prevent much larger and more expensive consequences from showing up later. I'm not going to deny that some of those regulations are bad - mandating that half of your construction workers are women of colour imposes additional costs for negative benefit. But I don't think many people can accurately determine which regulations fall into the former category and which fall into the latter.

Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation.

Nobody reasonable wants to throw nuclear waste into the river. What reasonable people want is to vitrify it and then keep it in containers in a parking lot-sized storage yard in the middle of nowhere and enventually maybe reprocess it.

The unreasonable people want to spend ridiculous amounts of money to bury it all underground or something because nuclear waste remains radioactive for millions of years and let's ignore the fact that the longer half-life something has, the less dangerous it is.

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Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation. Building nuclear reactors on earthquake fault lines is in fact a bad idea, as is building them in floodplains or directly next to the sea. Your nuclear reactor should also be built to rigorous construction standards rather than relying on cheap contractors who half-arse everything and replace a bunch of structural cement with styrofoam to reduce construction costs.

But I don't think many people can accurately determine which regulations fall into the former category and which fall into the latter.

At the risk of embarrassing myself, I feel like I could pretty easily sort them into 'yes' (most of the stuff you mentioned), 'no', and 'demands further enquiry' if I didn't have political considerations to worry about.

Then nothing is cost-effective except for fossil fuels and hydroelectricity, ultimately.

But we already knew that; that's why banning their use is such a powerful socioeconomic weapon. Nuclear just happens to be both the closest you get to viability (since the plants from the '70s and '80s seem to be doing just fine; that was back when construction and labor were way cheaper though) and something that's arguably worth funneling research dollars into from a materials science perspective.

even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millennia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment

This line always frustrates me because this is an isolated demand for rigor. Mine drainage (and it is a rather interesting flex that a modern mining company saw fit to name itself after the most expansive environmental mining disaster zone in human history- that being the Rio Tinto, which is what that's a picture of) will kill future Fred Flintstone far more quickly than anything else will. Fortunately, we discovered radioactivity before we invented the backhoe.

And I get that you have to convince John Q. Public of that, who will never come around in their lifetimes thanks, ironically enough, to radiation exposure (they sat too close to the TV while watching Simpsons reruns). Which is why you basically can't do this until you have a military that will deal with that.

Then nothing is cost-effective except for fossil fuels and hydroelectricity, ultimately.

Correct! Hell, forget about cost - there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels.

But we already knew that; that's why banning their use is such a powerful socioeconomic weapon.

Nature is already going to do that for us - not only are the fossil fuels going to eventually run out, rational human beings prioritised the easiest-to-access and most efficient stores of fossil fuels. The energy return on energy invested of conventional fossil fuels is going down, and the EROEI of shale and fracking is even worse.

This line always frustrates me because this is an isolated demand for rigor.

No, not at all. I believe mining should be heavily regulated, especially when it comes to disposal of hazardous and toxic wastes. Allowing people to pollute and destroy the biosphere imposes immense costs on the rest of society - it is a form of abusing the commons, and is ultimately substantially more expensive than properly disposing of the waste. It's just that the cost is paid by the rest of society as opposed to the mining companies.

Which is why you basically can't do this until you have a military that will deal with that.

How long are you going to be waiting? We've already hit peak conventional oil, and tight oil is significantly less competitive on an EROEI basis (which is the only basis that actually matters). Nuclear power, barring some great new discovery or innovation(which, to their credit, the Chinese may have actually achieved), will remain on the shelves in most cases because it is just not capable of functioning as a viable replacement for fossil fuels due to the poor EROEI.

Nature is already going to do that for us - not only are the fossil fuels going to eventually run out, rational human beings prioritised the easiest-to-access and most efficient stores of fossil fuels. The energy return on energy invested of conventional fossil fuels is going down, and the EROEI of shale and fracking is even worse.

Isn’t there quite a bit of easy to access fossil fuels that are off limits for political reasons, eg Venezuela’s dictator not trusting anybody capable of drilling?

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I'm not sure I believe that regulation is the reason why we don't have fission

I'm one degree removed from the industry and I'm sorry, but regulation => cost is the reason why we don't have more fission.

Then why doesn't China have more fission? Hell, since the US is so rich in fossil resources: why didn't RUSSIA ever get more fission?

Gattsuru has already answered but we've always had a bit of a head start on the technology for high-quality fission plants. Expecting mind-bogglingly corrupt communist regimes to do it well seems counterintuitive.

We've always had a bit of a head start on the technology for high-quality fission plants. Expecting mind-bogglingly corrupt communist regimes to do it well seems counterintuitive.

Come on, this is cope. The Soviets had the first nuclear power plant in the world online, and by the 60s they had a unified civil design ready (the VVER), regularly putting up new 400 MW reactors. By the early 70s, the VVER had iterated to a standard gigawatt design, and they built quite a few of those in the early 70s (most of them are online today) and then just... never stopped. There will be new gigawatt VVERs connecting to the grid in the next 2-3 years. The Soviets, of course, also got a ton of naval reactors online quite quickly, which is a far more impressive feat. We'll ignore the slight... reactor design detour they took with the RBMK, and focus on the fact that they didn't even let that shit show stop them for one second. They decommissioned some of them, kept others running, and went straight back to building more VVERs.

The Chinese had several decades where they could have bought reactors from the Soviets, licenced the Soviet design and/or straight copied that reactor. They did all of that for many other vital technology stacks.

What I'm trying to say is: even high state capacity corrupt communist regimes with access to uranium and a well-developed homegrown nuclear industry didn't build an energy abundance electro-state. No matter how thin you cut your security margins, and no matter how hard you subsidy the industry, no matter how many dozens of reactors you have your commie slaves build: it never actually gets all that cheap. If you have coal or gas, you might as well just burn that. And if you made it into the 2020s and now have terawatt solar capacity... well, you probably know how that's is going: you can just try to have your commie slaves install a nice round 600 GW (yeah, yeah, I know: peak) of new generation capacity. Per year.

I'm probably more aligned with you than you think on this. One weakness of capitalism is that it's not going to build "an energy abundance electro-state" when the demand isn't there. Especially when coal or gas is the shortest putt.

This has definitely been true for China up until very recently, and for the US as well. My point is that we've made Nuclear far more expensive than it needs to be, despite our relatively hungry first-world energy demands. In some cases, we've artificially depressed the price of fossil fuel generation and/or reduced the externalities associated with it through technology, which also hurts the case for nuclear.

One weakness of capitalism is that it's not going to build "an energy abundance electro-state" when the demand isn't there. Especially when coal or gas is the shortest putt.

I know what you mean, but right now we're seeing everywhere around the world that capitalism can also do stuff just from the supply side. Solar and batteries are getting so cheap (especially in grids that are still below 50% renewable), they are displacing almost all new generation capacity. Once that capacity is online and starting to get amortized, electricity prices should drop, which will bring up demand. It's the slow way, but it should work. Historically, cheaper energy has always resulted in people ending up spending MORE money on energy - because it gets used for so much more things.

My point is that we've made Nuclear far more expensive than it needs to be, despite our relatively hungry first-world energy demands.

This is certainly true, but I'm not convinced nuclear ever had a chance against the fossil capacity of the past and the renewable capacity of the future. Reactors are large and complex, and such projects often resist scaling laws (see also: housing, hospitals, dams, bridges). I'm curious to see what the Chinese manage to do with their modular reactors. I'm skeptical: nuclear reactors work better if they are large. But making them in a factory might unlock some extreme efficiency gains. We'll see.

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Over five percent of China's power comes from fission plants, and that's underrating it since they've got very high uptime compared to on-demand plants. As for why it hasn't scale up faster, China's political classes had very obvious mixed feelings about dependence on foreign-produced infrastructure for a long time, which only went harder as western regulatory overhead killed western nuclear power. While they've theoretically had 'domestic' production of nuclear plants since the mid-90s, they didn't actually manage serious production of the CNP-600s until 2010-2012... at which point the Fukushima disaster and its political fallout lead them to go back to the drawing board and start the production cycle again.

But they've put >3 GW of fission power online just in the last year. As bad as their political situation is for power construction, it's still beating the west's.

Over five percent of China's power comes from fission plants

This is... not all that much? Slightly more than necessary to keep the tech stack alive enough for a weapons program?

China's political classes had very obvious mixed feelings about dependence on foreign-produced infrastructure for a long time

I've talked about that in another reply, they had multiple decades of close friendship with the soviets during which getting a licence and tech support for the VVER reactor would have been trivial. They had decades of messing with a home grown design. It never got all that cheap, which is extremely concerning, because the Chinese have world class expertise in optimizing the last cent of slack out of industrial processes.

But they've put >3 GW of fission power online just in the last year.

This is impressive - for nuclear. And that summarized our sad story about the entire technology. Because they increased their coal capacity by 42 GW (they probably took old coal plants offline, which means they installed even more new coal plants than those 42 GW) and they seriously plan to make it to 600 GW (peak) of new solar and wind capacity in 2025.

Russia has quite a lot of nuclear power, which is remarkable considering that, as you say, they care minimally about the environment and have abundant access to fossil fuels. Further, it's worth noting that the more civilised European parts of Russia are the parts with the most nuclear power, comprising around 40% of their generation.

If nuclear power is competitive with Russian fossil fuels, that means it's pretty darn cheap!

China doesn't have much nuclear power at present, but they are investing an enormous amount in building plants, and their forecasts are that it will quadruple in proportion of their energy supply over the next 25 years--and that's with the buildout of other energy sources!

Looks like I'm wrong about Russia! They have actually an increasing share of nuclear power as a percentage of total electricity mix and are building a number of new power plants that will be online later this decade!

Quadruple nuclear still puts China at only 20% of electricity from nuclear which is comparable to Russia right now. This does represent a big difference from the US still, but I'm not sure it will be enough. What we need to start seeing is a decline in the total amount of fossil energy in the electricity mix, which we haven't even seen in Russia. I actually don't think we've seen this anywhere except for maybe Germany/UK, but the renewable buildout in those locations has obvious problems of intermittency.

Nuclear is better than I thought though, so I stand corrected.

Yeah.

Unless something is very wrong about my understanding of physics, we have beautiful technological solutions for almost every civilizational problem just sitting there, if only we can solve the coordination problems necessary to use them.

Although I do start to worry that we don't have a sufficient supply of competent people to coordinate around even if we could. The main disconnect from optimistic/utopic Sci-Fi from the past, including Older Star Trek, and the current reality is a ready supply of smart, driven people can work together to solve any pressing issues in front of them.

This is what makes Atlas Shrugged evergreen. Its depiction of a society that regresses technologically not because of loss of knowledge or expertise but simple loss of will will always be terrifyingly plausible.

I do start to worry that we don't have a sufficient supply of competent people

I think this is less of a problem than may at first appear. I think large amounts of human capital is locked up in playing video games. Obviously the median player is basically useless, but there are so many skilled players who don't aspire to much besides playing video games.

I was watching a former world record run of FFVII recently and the guy doing it was the most milquetoast underachiever in life I could imagine. He was talking about how his dream job was to finish community college and get a union job as an electrician. Or take Haelian, a pro Hades player with multiple world firsts in various challenges: before switching to full-time gaming, I think he worked at Walgreens (as a shelf stocker, not a strategist at corporate HQ). As a strong believer in Spearman's hypothesis, I'm confident these people severely underestimate how gifted they are and how successful they could be in mainstream professional work. They're just lowborn, and don't view the professional world as something that's even available to them. And it's not like the cultural class markers even relevant anymore -- this isn't Victorian England, where you have to hold your spoon in the right way or be shunned by civilised society. Musk is off smoking pot on Joe Rogan, and Alex Karp is apparently doing crack before going on interviews. The behavioral standards are not high. If you're competent, you're allowed in.

I guess that depends on how efficient you think "The Sort" has gotten.

My general perception is that if some person (in the West) possesses real noteworthy talent at a marketable ability, they will be identified and absorbed by some talent-hungry institution, AI Lab, Quant Trading Company, Pharma, etc. etc.

Although I could believe the hypothesis that there's a lot of guys with talent but limited discipline/drive who are ascertaining (correctly?) that beyond monetary rewards, the incentives to go out and use your talents are kinda dulled. You're not all that likely to find the love of your life, have kids, have a fulfilling long-term life and avoid burning out by age 40, so hey, smoking weed and playing vidya with the bros is an acceptable substitute.

What do we think would cause the U.S. to try and draw forth from such a 'latent' talent reserve?

I know it sounds gay, but it really is a loss of civilisational vision. There is no Mandate of Heaven that inspires gifted people to actually build cool stuff.

Part of this is that everything is so myopically chart-driven from the top down. It's one of the things I like about the Arabs: was the Burj Khalifa "worth it" in some strictly financial, bean-counter sense? Almost certainly not. It would have been vastly more efficient to build a bunch of concrete boxes and use the space for the same purpose.

But the Arabs do not have such a severe chart-worshipping brainworm infestation. The Burj Khalifa is badass, and badassery justifies itself.

I know it sounds gay, but it really is a loss of civilisational vision. There is no Mandate of Heaven that inspires gifted people to actually build cool stuff.

No, I agree.

The coolest 'monumental' works human have recently achieved are the aforementioned Burj Khalifa, SpaceX's Starship (still in progress) and, no shit, the Las Vegas Sphere.

The Sphere is more ephemeral, of course, but its such a cool thing to exist in its own right.

There is a serious lack of inspiration from things 'larger than the self.' Religious belief has declined, national pride seems on the wane, and I think there are fewer truly inspirational figures around that people would cast aside their lives to follow.

I feel it myself. I've had to inculcate in myself a 'civilizational vision' for radical secular humanism that views conquering the local solar system as my own personal manifest destiny. That's something to do that feels big and important enough to matter.

But I'm an odd duck, I don't think this is a vision that will unite all that many people in its current state.

The coolest 'monumental' works human have recently achieved are the aforementioned Burj Khalifa, SpaceX's Starship (still in progress) and, no shit, the Las Vegas Sphere.

We haven't yet stopped building. It's pretty easy to fill out that list a little, even if you look just at the anemic Euros: The Sagrada Familia made impressive progress over the last couple of years, the Millau Viaduct is pretty monumental, and - while harder to just look at, on account of being underground - the the Gotthard Base Tunnel and the Large Hadron Collider are gigantic feats of engineering. I can recommend visiting the latter when they do upgrade next time, even just the detector halls are monuments (and you can only enter them when they shut everything down during construction).

I think most of those will stand all throughout the fall of the West. People will live in their shadows after centuries of decline.

Although I could believe the hypothesis that there's a lot of guys with talent but limited discipline/drive who are ascertaining (correctly?) that beyond monetary rewards, the incentives to go out and use your talents are kinda dulled. You're not all that likely to find the love of your life, have kids, have a fulfilling long-term life and avoid burning out by age 40, so hey, smoking weed and playing vidya with the bros is an acceptable substitute.

Hey, now. I neither smoke weed, nor do I have any bros to play the handful of games I can actually play with. I'm basically stuck playing old Capcom fighters in single-player and learning to despise the announcer in MVC2 with a passion.

I know it's not directly the point but I'm equally baffled by your views as you would be (I suspect) of mine.

AI will be an expensive nothinburger

What makes you say that? AI has already ruined education, flooded the Internet with even more low-effort content from images, text, video to music, and even caused new kinds of psychosis. Oh and it's changed a lot of the nature of software engineering (causing a crisis in the junior dev market), data analysis (NLP is pretty much solved), and general automation of tasks. That's without going into computer vision, speech-to-text, etc. To not see that would require you to be, I don't know, a rural farmer in an African country or something.

But I occasionally see people with the same opinion as you, and we don't actually live in completely different realities. Or do we? Is it just impossible not to be in a bubble and capture only an easily biased sliver of reality? How do you avoid that and stay objective? I can just bluntly say your facts are wrong and mine are right, but I feel like that's missing the point.

I should clarify my view on AI. I don't disagree with any of your points, but I don't think AI will be materially transformative in the way that people seem to think around here. It's all incremental improvement (and destruction). It's not going to solve the energy crisis or help us discover genuine new knowledge.

In the long run it's also not going to last. We are going to run out of cheap energy or AI is going to rot everyone's brains enough that it can't self perpetuate.

Engine efficiency was just incremental improvements, and then 90% of horses disappeared in 20 years.

Nearly all progress is based on small, incremental improvements. The first steam engines were toys, then they were only useful for pumping water out of coal mines, then for stationary factories, then trains, etc.

I think we've reached a point where AI is already materially transformative, and it's impossible to deny the speed of the progress that's happened since Attention Is All You Need came out in 2017.

Okay but AI can't break the laws of physics. We just hit peak copper, have been at peak oil for 5 years, and the Co2 that we've added to the atmosphere has already caused the planet to warm by 1.5 C. We know what the solutions to these problems are, we just can't do them. I guess AI can help psyop these things but that's not a positive development.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The Dawn of Everything. Finally getting around to Bax' The Fraud of Feminism, which has been on my list for a while.

I finished Freedom this past week. In short, I think it's one of the best books I've read in a long time.

So few writers can pull off truly distinct characters without dressing them up in a variety of cultures or ethnicities. They had their own beliefs, decision-making process, and appearance to everyone else. In short, they all felt real.

Some of them were actually better than others, which seems like something other novelists are allergic to admitting when writing a book that's about just people. Other books devolve into sloppy morally-ambiguous mess, which was cool when I was 13 and is now totally insufferable.

Franzen apparently wrote it primarily before the culture war amped up, with it being published in 2010. I shudder to think what would have happened if he'd done it any later.

So many little things just stuck out and made me stop to think and savor. The way he writes about 9/11 felt like it captured what both it and Covid meant to me. Midwestern culture that so many people overlook and don't appreciate. The ways that love and lust and beauty influence us.

Any more and I'll spoil it, but I've already recommended it to 3 people and I don't do that as a rule.

One-third of the way through Cryptonomicon. The likelihood of my finishing this book before the end of the year is narrowing.

Cryptonomicon

I read Snow Crash recently and thought it was wacky but quite fun. Also metaverse. Is this a similar book?

A few time longer and much slower pace. Snow Crash is quick and action packed. Cryptonomicon is very much not. I prefer Cryptonomicon, but it is quite different.

Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying it. But my progress on it has been slow because I've been busy and the print is very small.

Still reading the Divine Comedy. I finished Purgatorio and am now into Paradiso. I'm still enjoying it enough to keep going, though it is definitely a slog as a non-enjoyer of poetry. I've also resumed trying to read through Theology of the Body, which is often very difficult to follow (which is very unusual for me), but I hate to let it be said that I didn't finish a book because it was too hard for me.

Are you reading the original Italian or a translation?

A translation. I'm reading this edition, which seems to be pretty decent.

Vault: Unbound Book 8 by Nicoli Gonnella.

Sovietistan. Norwegian journalist visits ex-Soviet Central Asia. A little annoying in some ways (she's a pushy liberal that's shocked by people not giving a fuck about democracy), but it's been really cool to learn about a part of the world that I didn't know anything about before.

Huh, might pick this up as a stocking-stuffer.

It's been a while since I've done one of these- what's a small scale conspiracy theory you're willing to go to bat for?

Now, by 'small scale conspiracy theory' I do not mean grand unified theories of the jewlluminati or lizard people, or major government direction, or whatever. It's small-scale.

Some things I think are likely true-

The 'Marriage penalty' in US welfare law is- or was- an intentional experiment to prove that marriage was outmoded in late-industrial societies. It fits the zeitgeist of the time and we know there were other reckless experiments going on in first world countries(like German pedophiles). It was not based on the assumption that single mothers need the help more.

Coyote predation on small children is far more common in the USA than commonly acknowledged(note that a huge increase over a trivial base is still trivial), and those toddlers who just disappear and everyone assumes the parents killed them but they're never charged because nobody ever finds the body were mostly snatched by coyotes. Wildlife departments and law enforcement agencies prefer to cover this up to discourage reprisals by poisoning, which has substantial knock on effects. The only confirmed coyote kill of a child(there is also a case of a hippie musician who wandered near a den, but this probably wasn't a predatory attack) was interrupted during the attack rendering it undeniable.

Conventional health wisdom overstates effect sizes because it originated in attempts to explain the rise of chronic disease in the mid twentieth century. In reality, these diseases became common because people lived long enough to get them(largely due to reduced disease burden), with effects from rising waistlines, sedentary lifestyles, etc.

That producers of stuff that is packaged in tubes - like toothpaste make it on purpose to throw their product away. I am fairly sure that most tubes are thrown probably with 30+ percent of their content. Even with dedicated squeezer - When i opened one with a knife I was able to coax 5-6 ml more.

Another one:

I think CTE is kind of a fake or exaggerated concept. It might have some relevance to boxers or NFL players, and even that seems sketchy to me. But it's vastly exaggerated how much getting hit in the head in casual ways by ordinary people is going to hurt you long term. It just doesn't add up when you consider how common getting punched in the head in a fight, or falling off something, or playing some form of tackle football, or fighting in a war, or getting thrown by a horse was throughout history. While everyone has always understood that a sufficiently hard kick to the head by a donkey will make a man retarded, there's no enduring folk wisdom of head shots making men change over time.

I tend to think it's an easy medicalized explanation for how men who are selected for their utility at violence are increasingly out of step with the world.

That's funny. My low-key conspiracy on CTE (and brain damage more broadly) is that it's actually far more common than anybody really wants to admit.

Around me, nearly everyone has stories about the normal guy who got a little "funny" over time. A lot of them are veterans or guys who work jobs that officially require hard hats but they don't wear them. I can't rule out things like PTSD or late onset schizophrenia. However, when the arty guy who got out of the army and immediately started working as a framer eventually loses the ability to remember what he had for breakfast or pronounce "penance", I can't help but think something somatic is involved.

Not a conspiracy theory (well, sort of).

TBI is shockingly common (especially in the military) and not shockingly...it is very bad for you.

TBIs aren't CTE, but damage to personality, substrate, and function from injuries is a known issue in the military and elsewhere.

When I consider it, I think that you wouldn't fight that often, and when you did, it wouldn't emphasize knockout blows; that while you would fall often you would naturally mind your head; that casualties of fights in wars were fewer than casualties on the march. In fact I suspect that there was no folk wisdom of head shots making men change over time because there was no career where you would intentionally put yourself in the way of many blows to the head and survive that for long enough.

(Anecdotally, Lermontov's The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov specifically describes a formalized fistfight at the city fair. The titular merchant, his wife disgraced by the tsar's official, deliberately strikes him in the head and kills him. It can be assumed that head shots were forbidden or at least heavily discouraged - he is tried for manslaughter, as opposed to the outcome being judged an unfortunate but natural outcome of the fight).

I always kinda thought the Dubai Chocolate meme was a way to cover up the whole "instagram whores getting shit on by Arabs in Dubai" thing. That people had started calling poop "Dubai chocolate" at some point and their government or whoever stepped in and made the campaign to drown out search results. I have 0 evidence of this it's all vibes.

Depending on how you define "conspiracy theory"… two come to mind:

  1. That Carolyn Bryant Donham was telling the truth about what happened to her, and that Timothy Tyson is lying when he claims she secretly, off the record, recanted to him.

  2. That the jury in Fulton County convicted the right guy for the murder of Mary Phagan.

It's been a while since I've done one of these- what's a small scale conspiracy theory you're willing to go to bat for?

Now, by 'small scale conspiracy theory' I do not mean grand unified theories of the jewlluminati or lizard people, or major government direction, or whatever. It's small-scale.

Be in forum full of wordcel super geniuses with great reading comprehension. Thread asks for small scale conspiracies.

Look at comments. See 9/11, Covid, all of modern architecture cited as "small scale."

Update priors on Oklahoma University student writing an essay that bad.

Anyway to answer the OP:

-- Musk never intended to buy Twitter, he wanted to buy enough stock to force the company to give him a board seat so he could advocate for the company to change some policies. Unfortunately, when he bought that stock, the SEC started investigating the way he did it, and the company informed him of all the things he wouldn't be allowed to say if he was on Twitter's board unless he wanted to face a shareholder lawsuit. The only way out was through, so he upped the stakes and put in an offer to buy the company, figuring that it would fall apart one way or another before being consummated and in the process he could shed the lawsuits. Unfortunately, right about then every social media stock dropped 20-30%, and the company officers had to hang onto his offer because it would maximize shareholder value, and so he was ultimately forced to purchase the company. This explains a lot about the shambolic way Twitter has been managed with DAU dropping by about 50% since the purchase.

-- The NBA orchestrated the Luka Doncic trade in exchange for fixing the draft lottery to get Flagg to the Mavs. The Buss family wanted to sell the Lakers, but their buyer balked at buying the team when its current incarnation consisted of the aging remnants of the 2020 championship team with no clear way forward. The NBA wanted to see the sale happen. So they convince the Mavs to trade Luka to the Lakers. Now LA has a young, good looking, marketable, MVP candidate for the next ten years. The team is sold for $10bn and in the process the value of every other NBA franchise goes up by, what, ten figures? We're talking about ~$30bn in value created! In turn, the Mavs win the NBA draft lottery despite 1/50 odds, and get Cooper Flagg, who if he turns out to be as good as Tyrese Maxey is the most marketable NBA player since Lebron. Luka for Anthony Davis and change is a terrible trade, Luka for Anthony Davis and Cooper Flagg might be decent business. The NBA also doesn't mind fixing the lottery to make sure Flagg goes to the Mavs, because they want to see him on a franchise that has historically been well run and has the ability to put pieces around Flagg immediately and get him into the playoffs, they don't want to see their Great White Hope first overall going to perpetual fuck ups like the Hornets, Wizards, or Sixers.

-- Opposite party politicians get along better than we think they do, same party politicians get along worse than we think they do.

-- I cannot provide details for professional reasons, but major consumer corporations have Indiana Jones style warehouses full of better mousetraps that they have determined it would not be profitable to market, but don't want to let anyone else license to compete with their existing products. I don't think the cure for cancer is in there, but it wouldn't surprise me if a better pill bottle and a better paperclip were.

-- Right wing twitter recently melted down when location was shown for accounts, and it turned out that 70% of users with a name like DefendTheWest turned out to be from India and Nigeria. I suspect that if we could do a similar reveal, it would turn out that a huge percentage of prominent identitarian authors on the left would turn out to be white ghostwriters with a black face attached. Tiffany Haddish's memoirs, for example, were ghostwritten by Tucker Max. We'll never find out, but I suspect that a lot of people aren't who we think they are.

The NBA orchestrated the Luka Doncic trade in exchange for fixing the draft lottery to get Flagg to the Mavs.

Interesting in the context of the preexisting small scale conspiracy theory that the giant casino company which owns the mavs deliberately traded him to reduce the team’s fortunes, because they think a losing team gives them more political influence.

Right wing twitter recently melted down when location was shown for accounts, and it turned out that 70% of users with a name like DefendTheWest turned out to be from India and Nigeria.

Also revealed a giant percentage of man hating feminists were from South Asia and sub Saharan Africa.

The trade was so bad it spawned instant conspiracy theories, but the payoffs only became apparent over time.

And I didn't even realize there were man hating feminist accounts from South Korea! What do they post? I'm surprised they even lied about it.

Coyotes are pretty well-hated and oft-culled because of their attacks on pets and livestock, though, and there's also the 'dingos ate ma baby' option of simple incompetence. That said, if you really want to go nuts on coyote conspiracies, the degree that coyote populations have exploded and the individual coyotes themselves have gotten much smarter in <10 generations is a real fun question.

For fun conspiracies I actually believe:

  • Piggate wasn't real. For all it Took Down A National Government, Cameron was already a political dead man walking before the drop, and it was just a really convenient way to force him out without actually engaging with the political controversies that had undermined his party. The same behavior is totally consistent with an already-unpopular prime minister getting smeared by a schmuck he'd pissed off badly enough, and then found that none of his 'friends' were willing to pay the political capital to back him up.
  • There was a coverup one direction or the other for the Bloomberg Supermicro thing: either a lot of people who could prove it were told not to do so at the risk of destabilizing international relationships, or a lot of people who could disprove it were told not to do so lest they destabilize US financial markets (and get blackballed). I'm not very confident on this one, but it's just such a weird goddamn story.
  • A number of serious industrial or transportation sector accidents were really Reinvented Suicide As A Group Activity, but various incident analysis groups have instead used them for purposes ranging from getting unrelated political goals to deflecting from local political or social problems to just shaking down foreign businesses for cash. There's been a handful of these situations where jurisdiction friction has lead to them getting 'caught' -- aviation is particularly prone to it, with SilkAir 185, EgyptAir 990, and the recent Air India 171 -- but I think they're far more common than anyone wants to admit or even mention publicly, especially since there's a risk that publicizing them could incentivize further or larger attacks of the same kind. Basically, most large countries have a bunch of CEAF 5735 in a thousand different fields. The SL-1 incident is the safest one to mention, but there's some electrical and chemical processing examples from the tens to hundreds of deaths.
  • A lot of 'advocacy organizations' related to industry regulations are wholly-owned government groups, and are explicitly-but-nonpublicly threatening to bring the weight of those government orgs to bear if targeted companies don't agree. Yeah, boring, almost too obvious to be worth mentioning for the obvious cases, between Ofcom and NCOSE existing, and X Twitter's recent fine in the UK. But there's a lot of these orgs running at <100 person levels regulating through smoke-filled backroom deals; a lot of what's 'weird' about the modern era is just the ability of those orgs to impact companies with large impacts but not the large scales of pre-internet companies.

group activity

Is that…Trek?

advocacy organizations

Not exactly unusual—didn’t Scott write about ADA enforcement in these terms? The main limiting factor is the difficulty of bringing a case. Technology has to have reduced that cost, so a given org can target smaller companies.

I dislike this class of law for other reasons, but I think we’re seeing a difference in degree, not in kind.

Is that…Trek?

Nextwave (cw: sound, mild profanity)! Only Warren Ellis comic I can unconditionally recommend. Very short series, sadly.

Not exactly unusual—didn’t Scott write about ADA enforcement in these terms? The main limiting factor is the difficulty of bringing a case. Technology has to have reduced that cost, so a given org can target smaller companies.

I think so, but I can't find it now. The ADA (and the Texas abortion pill thing) are laws or at least regulations on the books, even if they're probably getting stretched to their breaking points. A lot of this stuff isn't a strict rule, or even necessarily written down anywhere, so much as it's just Understood at ultimately one-on-one scales. Sometimes that's unavoidable: in aviation, I think you could get five opinions from three DERs if you bring up flutter analysis. But it ends up in a world where a lot of things are theoretically allowed, and you can even find people doing them quite publicly, but also prohibited.

Old news, but I just ran across it when it went viral again recently and the Bloomberg story reminds me of it:

"How many similar devices with hidden functionalities might be lurking in your home, just waiting to be discovered?"

Exploitable systems are so much easier to create than secure systems that it's hard to attribute even actual proven exploitability to malice! Aside from the software issues in that discussion, consider the hardware. Fifty years ago, if something you brought into your business had a tiny secret microphone, that would have been proof-positive that someone with major signals-intelligence chops was trying to bug you. Today, it just means that the fastest way to create a special-purpose electronic device is to just grab some general-purpose computer board and flash it with your own special-purpose software, and of course your general-purpose-computer designer threw in a 3.5-cent-each MEMS microphone because why not?

That said, if you really want to go nuts on coyote conspiracies, the degree that coyote populations have exploded and the individual coyotes themselves have gotten much smarter in <10 generations is a real fun question.

Shoot, baby. I'm pro coyote, because A) I think they're neat, B) My school team was the Coyotes, C) my wife's grandmother used "Coyote" as a racial slur to refer to me.

This is interesting, as I was never under the impression that Cameron stood down as a result of Piggate. He nailed his colours to the mast on where he stood on the Euroscepticism issue and put it to a referendum to settle the matter definitively, gambling that most Brits broadly shared his view. The gamble didn't pay off, and that was that.

Yeah, that's probably a more honest engagement with the events. I've just seen a lot of people say it was a big important deal that tells us about falling modern standards, so it really bugs me that it's just such a mess.

Funnily enough you just reminded me that I dressed up as Cameron for Halloween '15, with a papier-machê pig's head attached to my waist. Annoyingly, several people at the party I went to thought I was dressing up as "the guy from Black Mirror", which I hadn't even seen at the time.

... I'm almost afraid to ask, but did you have the pig's head facing in, or out?

In. There was also a papier-machê member protruding from my fly going into the pig's mouth.

That's an impressive amount of effort for a Halloween costume, and some remarkably unobservant partygoers.

Yep - Piggate was eminently survivable, and did more damage to the people pushing it than it did to Hameron. It was hilarious, but everyone including Corbyn knew that it was nothing more than that. The source was an unsourced allegation in a book by a bitter donor who hadn't received the peerage he thought he'd bought and paid for.

Brexit, on the other hand, was total political self-destruction.

I still think that Justin Trudeau might be a Castro. There was an attempted debunking, but i read a debunking of that debunking and, well, how hard would it be to get a little Trudeau DNA and a little Castro DNA? A rich person could surely do it.

I am sort of fully in on the "certain things get invented to ruin bad SEO". Like this recent "Dubai Chocolate" fad. Surely it was started to detract from certain nasty scatological rumors about high end treatment of escorts in Dubai. This is along the same lines as Disney creating the movie Frozen to take cryogenic search results away if you looked up famous old Walt rumors, aka googling Disney Frozen no longer takes you to snopes.

I'm not conspiracy minded but the Trudeau thing is irresistible to me. I hope it gets confirmed or refuted in my lifetime.

I wonder if AI will be able to tell from facial features.

100% agree on Trudeau, he looks nothing like his ostensible father.

I believe that the ugliness forced on us everywhere we turn (architecture, modern "art", etc.) is deliberately done in an attempt to break us, using the method C.S. Lewis wrote about in That Hideous Strength. The extreme version in the Cheka Vallmajor cannot yet be fully replicated in public, but already we have seats that we can't sit on, public spaces that intentionally play unappealing music to get people to move along, and the various other elements of "hostile architecture" made by people who hate us and try to break us. (As always, the sensible solution — imprison/institutionalize/rehouse the people that make "hostile architecture" "necessary" — remains steadfastly untried.)

That…doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Spiky benches are chosen for deterrence, and deterrence is at odds with reeducation. Conversely, if you imprisoned every homeless person, it would do approximately nothing to the demand for ugly art.

That the department of defense shot down the plane over PA on 9/11and faked the calls and the heroic story of the passengers crashing the plane to boost national morale.

Similar to your coyote theory, I have a deep belief that there is a self-sustaining mountain lion population in the Appalachian mountain range. I know too many people who are generally trustworthy who claim to have seen them, and I'm pretty sure I've seen tracks myself deep in West Virginia. I've also seen something in Northern PA once, but I can't discount that it might have simply been the biggest bobcat I've seen in my life. The light was terrible.

The more conspiratorially-minded members of my family suggest that the reason they aren't acknowledged is because it would play merry hell on local industry due to the endangered species act. I've also heard tales that they were intentionally introduced to keep the deer population in check.

Plausible -- I live in a place where nobody disputes that there's ample cougars (also bobcats etc), but I've seen exactly one of each in my (40+, pretty outdoorsy, lives literally in the woods) life.

Up here, anywhere you go that's not 100% paved, you are probably in the territory of some cougar -- but they don't want to be seen, so you don't.

Second this one, I'm of the mind that it's true myself, though I think that simple bureaucratic inertia plus public safety concerns, when taken together, is more than enough to explain the conventional wisdom.

  1. Smoking is genuinely really bad for you, but was used as scapegoat for cancers caused by numerous industrial chemicals. Cancer rates have not reduced as much as they should have given the massive decline in smoking.

  2. President Garfield’s assassination was part of a conspiracy to ram through significant changes to the structure of the federal government that allowed for the formation of an entrenched deep state

  3. Due to widespread corruption in the New York construction industry in the 1970s, the twin towers were not nearly as fire-resistant in reality as they were on paper.

  4. Bill Gates and other big tech entrepreneurs are simply front guys for the CIA, which actually founded their companies.

  5. DARPA and intelligence agencies have had access to AI since the late 1980s or early 1990s. The public internet was created to allow for the formation of massive training data sets for more advanced models.

  6. Tactical nuclear weapons have been used in various conflicts, and the various nations with detection capability have decided not to publicize this.

  7. The woke mania and economic decline of the United States is an intentional Boys from Brazil style attempt to recreate the social and economic conditions of Weimar Germany in order to provoke a future fascist backlash.

  8. The Apollo program was scotched because of a sharp increase in solar weather activity starting in early 1973 that made it too dangerous. In particular there was a large solar flare about two weeks after the Apollo 17 mission that scientists calculated would have killed the crew had it happened during the mission. This I actually have some confirmation for. That’s why you could go to the moon in a tin can in 1968 but now Elon Musk and NASA are now constantly talking about how there has to be multiple-foot thick shielding for any manned mission outside low earth orbit.

  9. Australia became a nuclear weapons state sometime in the past few years.

  10. American football is fixed like professional wrestling.

DARPA has had AI since at least 1969. I heard a presentation by a very senior (in both age and rank) DARPA scientist and he mentioned that his research program in machine learning started that year. He also mentioned that he was awarded his PhD in 1964 and I believe his doctoral work was also in ML, though I'm not 100% on that. In any case, his work was in ML speech detection. Incidentally, he was very bearish on AGI and called out nearly everything we hear about the topic as lies and marketing. This was a couple of years ago.

The woke mania and economic decline of the United States is an intentional Boys from Brazil style attempt to recreate the social and economic conditions of Weimar Germany in order to provoke a future fascist backlash.

Can you unpack this a bit? Who's doing it? How? Why?

I’m not sure who exactly would be doing it. I know there were influential families (the Fords, the Bushes) and titans of industry in the 30s and 40s that were fairly sympathetic to naziism. There was also a decent amount of contact between the OSS and German intelligence during the war. Allen Dulles, the later head of the CIA, was back-channeling with Heinrich Himmler to try and negotiate a separate peace between Nazi Germany and America so that the Nazi government could remain standing and be used by the west as a bulwark against Communism. Some Nazi intelligence divisions were basically rolled intact into the American intelligence apparatus after the war ended.

You could say that America resembles Weimar Germany just because there are certain characteristics that sick or declining societies all have, but some of it seems awfully specific.

  1. There is a giant coordinated push for Marxism in the early 2010s, both the old school kind and the new Bio-Leninist kind.
  2. There seems to have been a giant coordinated push to weaponize American black people as a Cossack class to oppress American white people. This doesn’t seem like it would work on its own, but it did an awfully good job of putting white Americans into a defensive crouch. This culminates in near-genocidal Hutu-style rhetoric against white people in 2020.
  3. There are suddenly suspiciously organized glowie-adjacent communist street fighters that took their name and logo from the communist street fighters in Weimar Germany. They generally seem to be trying to act as unsympathetic as possible.
  4. The controlled detonation of the American economy in 2020, inducing hyperinflation.
  5. The coordinated lockstep pushing of transgenderism and prostitution culture. This and Antifa is what really started to make me suspicious, because those were both phenomena that was specific to Weimar Germany.
  6. In 2022 there is a sudden, at least partially astroturfed push to associate Jews with the prior events I described in the last several paragraphs. There was definitely organic anti-semitism in the years before that, and some genuine bad behavior by prominent Jewish people in America. But 2022 is when you start seeing very consistent very intense anti-Jewish rhetoric on Reddit, which is very odd given that Reddit Turbo-jannies were and are such prudes about literally everything else. I have hung around on 4chan long enough to know what organic anti-semitism looks like, and what I started seeing in 2022 looked different, odd. It looked more like organized shill behavior that I had previously associated with left wing stuff like transgenderism and astroturfed pro-Ukraine sentiment on Reddit. Crucially, I started noticing this a full year before October 7 and the bombing of Gaza, which is usually marked as the beginning of wide scale public anti-semitism.
  7. October 7 happens in 2023 (which stinks to high hell but that’s an entire post on its own). The invasion of Gaza starts and now you suddenly have a left-right triangulation against Jewish people. The Israeli government seems to be working very hard through all this to act as unlikeable and shady as humanly possible.
  8. Ever since then there has been just a full-bore shill campaign against Jews on Reddit, Twitter, TikTok and 4chan. I used to hang out on 4chan when half the posters were literal Stormfront users, and it was never this intense. It definitely smacks of organized shilling and not just people who genuinely dislike Jews.
  9. Then a sudden coordinated push to rehabilitate Naziism. First for liberals with the glowie-affiliated Azov Battalion (“Shut up Chud, It’s just the Ukrainian skull and pinwheel of good fortune!”) and then for conservatives with Tucker Carlson and Darrell Cooper (who both have connections to CIA and the defense industrial complex).

So to me it looks like there was potentially a coordinated push to induce Weimar problems and then present Weimar solutions.

I agree with basically everything here, but my deduction is different.

There's strong signs that it's jews who are in charge of all this. Whoever is doing this is clearly powerful. The woke clearly hate everything they can relate to the holocaust, to the point that their hatred of nationalism led to an almost global consensus that borders are immoral. Whoever is behind this is also trying to destroy Christianity and its traditions. A lot of people who have warned against jews historically have been assassinated (e.g. JFK). The woke is also driven by the media - and jews are extremely over-represented in the media. If you've been on 4chan, you've seen the image I have in mind right now. It also happens that jews aren't at home in America, and they're therefore in a position in which they can harm America without harming themselves. Only globalists and those without strong roots can benefit from causing this much harm.

I've never been on 4chan, but even I know that a lot of users predicted our current events, warning that the jews would do these things. And historically, these issues have also been blamed on freemasons, FBI/NSA/CIA/GCHQ, "the system", satanism, feminism, communism, the illuminati, NWO, globalism and on elite families tied to banking (Goldman Sachs, the Rothschild family, Rockefellers, etc), and many other groups, and most of these claims aren't wrong, the question is just which group is in charge, if any.

While there might be some non-organic anti-semitism, the jews could be spreading that in order to legitimize their victimhood. And Trump said "America first", only to start sending billions of tax-dollars to Israel. Of course this results in a spike in anti-semitism, anything else would be strange. The reason that even Reddit has some anti-semitism is likely because jews overplayed their hand.

You know a lot of things, so you should have a clear picture, and yet you discard the most likely conclusion. Of course, you may have valid reasons for doing so. Have you heard the translated speeches of Hitler? They don't sound old, they contain things which are still relevant today, and Hitler blamed them on the jews. Given the jews strong representation in positions of power, and their high average IQs, I find it unlikely that there's somebody above the jews who is manipulating them.

You focus a lot on recent events, but most of these issues started decades ago.

Do you have specific conflicts in mind, in which nukes were deployed?

I have seen videos of bombings that the Saudi Air Force conducted in Yemen and that the IAF did in Lebanon with explosions that seem to be far, far beyond the size of anything that they have the capability to carry on the planes they have (to my knowledge neither have heavy bombers). Also there was a Ukrainian attack on a Russian facility in I believe Toretsk where it looks like the damage is consistent with around a 15 kiloton explosion. Also the documented fact that a hydrogen bomb went off in the middle of the Indian Ocean in 1979 and supposedly no one can figure out who did that (I’m guessing the US and USSR both knew and just didn’t say).

I have seen videos of bombings that the Saudi Air Force conducted in Yemen and that the IAF did in Lebanon with explosions that seem to be far, far beyond the size of anything that they have the capability to carry on the planes they have (to my knowledge neither have heavy bombers).

I am ignorant of that conflict. What would have motivated the use of such a weapon in that case?

Despite what wags online will tell you, nuclear weapons would actually be very useful in retail combat. The reason for their lack of usage is for political reasons to maintain the nuclear taboo, not because they aren’t useful.

I do know that the Houthis and Hezbollah both use very deep underground fortifications of the kind that would be hard to take out even with multiple 20,000 pound bunker busters dropped from a B-2. Much less trying to take those apart with fighter-bombers, which can carry a 2,500 pound munition.

The Vela incident was almost certainly an Israeli nuclear test.

Wasn’t the 1979 bomb South African?

I’m going to call BS on the Ukrainian nuke- if they had one, they’d hit Moscow.

@cablethrowaway @hydroacetylene

But notice that there was never any kind of official statement on who did it by any of the countries that were capable of investigating and verifying. They were content to leave the public in the dark.

I’m going to call BS on the Ukrainian nuke- if they had one, they’d hit Moscow.

It wouldn’t necessarily have been a Ukrainian nuke. But yes, that puzzles me too, I don’t know why you would drop one tactical nuke on some warehouse complex in Toretsk without elaboration or credit or apparently any further strikes, and apparently no response from the Russian government. Maybe it was a foward-deployed 380 KT Russian nuclear weapon that fizzled when it got hit by a conventional strike and produced a 15 KT yield.

I don’t buy the official explanation either, which is that an entire warehouse of S-400 interceptors were sitting in a warehouse five miles from the front line. And even accepting that, it seems like way too big of an explosion. Fire storms 12 kilometers wide, picked up on satellites for monitoring wildfires.

1979 was believed to be either South African with Israeli help or Israeli with South African help. The explosion appeared to be only a few kilotons-equivalent, though, so it could have been a fission bomb rather than a "hydrogen bomb", and if it was a fusion bomb then it was almost certainly a neutron bomb, designed for "low" explosive yield in favor of radiation.

I can't imagine Ukraine would invite nuclear reprisal by nuking Moscow, not unless the tanks were literally rolling into Kyiv at the time, but Toretsk would be an even less likely target.

Point 3. is a new one for me but makes a lot of sense.

My 9/11 conspiracy theories are: a) there was a systemic coverup of evidence that the government had heard and (understandably) brushed off warnings ahead of time, and evidence that the emergency response procedures did not function adequately and could have mitigated the impact of 9/11 after the first impact. b) immediately after the event, there was a fairly rushed and slipshod propaganda response to both tie al-Qaeda unquestionably to the attacks with public evidence (i.e. without revealing any sensitive intelligence) and to make them look bad that involved faking some stuff (e.g. the famous strip club Koran).

I also suspect AQ might have remained an unreliable but still associated CIA proxy even as they started escalating attacks against US forces and installations overseas. So I think there may have been some covering up of the fact that CIA personnel were communicating with and possibly providing aid to AQ potentially right up until the attack. They might have even been rooked into unwittingly providing some material aid for the attack itself. This could also explain some of the intelligence failure, since CIA might have been convinced that AQ were mostly-controllable good boys (even if they occasionally got rowdy) and not likely to do something that drastic against the mainland US.

Unlike a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, I’m not particularly wedded to a single theory and I have contemplated a lot of different narratives.

On point 6, I've never been able to shake the suspicion that Aum Shinrikyo conducted a nuclear test in Australia back in the day.

I haven’t heard of this, can you elaborate?

Back in the early 90s, Aum shinrikyo bought a remote sheep farm in Australia. Not long after, a "seismic event" was recorded in the area, with a few truckers in the area reporting a massive explosion and fireball.

The official explanation was an earthquake. The official explanation ignored that Aum was interested in building a nuke at the time, seemed to be actively mining uranium, and might have actually had the capacity to do so, having recruited some nuclear engineers.

Good lord. Maybe that’s how they got caught, that would be detected by satellite. How long was this before the subway attack?

About two years

I don't personally consider the following to be a conspiracy theory, but quite a few people do:

I'm pretty sure that COVID-19 was created (modified) in the lab and (accidentally) leaked.

And the cover-up was done not only by the commies in typical style in China, but also by the professional community who don't want their gravy train to stop.

Edit: another: I suspect that the heavy focus in school on the "oppression of women" throughout history is there to establish a subtle but impactful sexism in favor of women ("the oppressed" who should be lifted up, despite current generations not being victims) and against men (collective punishment of young boys who did not take part in past crimes). There's also the issue of how one-sided the portrayal is. You don't get explanations of how a lack of modern technology made it sensible to divide labor along gender lines, or how misandry has probably also always existed.

There are a lot of things that make me believe the same. The first is that biolabs, and Chinese biolabs in particular, have a pretty bad track record when it comes to keeping the viruses inside the cordon. If it's happened before, why should be we be surprised that it happened again. I think the Bayesians here use the term "priors" on that topic.

The other thing that nags me about it was the general expert framing of the situation in general. It went something like this:

Person 1: I think this came from a lab.

Experts: a bioweapon? Why would you suggest that this was a bioweapon? There's no way the Chinese would have released a bioweapon on their own people. Only a madman would even consider creating a highly contagious bioweapon in the first place. Shame on you for suggesting it's a bioweapon, you foil-hatted lunatic.

And here I am wondering where the bioweapon topic even came up.

I'm old enough to recall the videos we got coming out of China back when Covid was just reving up. People spontaneously dropping in the streets, apartments being welded shut with tenants inside, the works.

My personal conspiracy theory is that Covid was bio-engineered in a lab, and when they realized it had gotten out, they didn't know which variant had escaped - and that there were much, much nastier variants than the one we got.

Hence China's initial reaction looking like something out of a zombie movie.

The thing is they kept up that reaction long, long after we knew what it was.

But yeah I'd like to see a documentary on the Chinese response. There's tons of great footage out there and some of it is the most dystopian stuff I've ever seen. Drones flying by apartment blocks telling people not to go out on their balconies and sing, and marking those who do.

It's really the most charitable explanation for the Western response as well -- I've personally settled on the theory that most first-world government agencies are a bitchin combination of evil and incompetent -- but if high-level officials had back-channel (ie. not publicly sharable) information from China that this virus was a potential bioweapon, what they did actually makes sense and might even have been a good idea.

The blackpill theory is that the virus was a bioweapon, designed to make ~everyone a drooling retard -- Mission Accomplished! (source: my lyin' eyes)

Has anyone here managed to get any fiction published lately? I've had a dry spell that's approaching three years now, and I'm wondering if my writing quality has taken a nose dive, or if I'm simply working the system wrong in the year of our Lord 2025.

If you've had luck, what's your current strategy?

I got a publishing offer like two years ago from Podium, but wasn't interested in finishing the story so I didn't accept it. But the amount of unsolicited interest I've gotten over the last year is definitely down, seems like the market's a bit glutted and there's less interest in pushing new stuff out atm.

I'm in the same boat as you, I've received nine rejections from literary agents in the last three weeks. I've no idea where I'm falling down, if it's the quality of the writing or if the query letter isn't grabbing their attention.

If you'd like some feedback on your query letter, feel free to DM me.

Up until a couple of years ago, I relied entirely on open submissions and had around a 1:3 hit rate. That completely nosedived in 2021, and by 2023 I was dead in the water.

Given that I'm not working with agents, I'm assuming that my query letter is not the problem.

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