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RenOS
something is wrong
22hr ago
My impression based on left-leaning friends & acquaintances (of which I have very, very many) is twofold:
The first is a general aesthetic. When people draw images for the green future, it's just a really nice-looking, organic neighbourhood, farms with happy animals, it's clean, people still live in modern-style housing right next to a beautiful forest. On the other side, when climate change and fossil fuels are shown, it's dirty, it's ugly same-looking cities with large heavy industry, animals in pain from ugly, pustulous wounds, people in cramped apartments far away from any green (which probably is dead anyway). On that level, it really is just the good ol' politics of in-favor-of-everything-good-against-everything-bad; If given the choice, absolutely everyone would take the former over the latter, if there are no other ramifications (which at least aren't shown nor talked about). Woke is mostly the same; It generally sells itself first and foremost on extremely benign-sounding slogans and tries to just ignore, talk away and suppress the mention of any and all problems. Of course trans is just about letting a small minority live as they please, of course women's rights are only about not being taken advantage of by evil men, of course anti-racism/colonialism is just about giving formerly oppressed groups their freedom back, etc. And the - primarily - women who make up the bulk of the support really aren't unpleasant for the most part, often the opposite, they just want everyone to get along, everyone to work towards the obvious, common good and to exclude the minority of evil men. If you just avoid calling their politics into question - which in daily life will be 99% irrelevant anyway - they are usually exceptionally helpful and pro-social. But, of course, they have a massive, noble-lie shaped hole (and also, they can be irritating busybodies, but that's more manageable).
The second is a general distrust of the profit motive. Several of my (mostly male) friends who are much more successful than me (managing-your-own-company or high-tier BigCorp middle-manager successful) have had more than enough personal experience of engaging in what they perceive as anti-social behaviour just to keep their company/section afloat (stuff like cutting out a newly emerging competitor with legally grey tactics, deliberately hiring badly-paid interns with the promise of a permanent position over and over, actively managing a funnel into addictive behaviour for your freemium game, etc.). They genuinely feel bad about this and want to restructure society so that this isn't done anymore in the future. They're rarely communists and are aware of its failure modes, they want markets, but their experience makes them believe that a many of the arguments against renewables are as bullshit as the old pro-smoking arguments; If you put up just the right limits on the market, we will have a great, green future!
Tbh the latter isn't even that far from my own position; It's just that I'm much more suspicious of government intervention blocking progress and protecting old, wasteful structures in an unholy BigState BigCorp marriage (also frequently called the cathedral).
pbmonster
23hr ago
The way you typically put energy in is to have a fast-moving neutron that is flying in to hit the mercury-198 atom. When you do the calculation, the required energy in for the neutron is just under 8.5MeV.
[Uranium/plutonium fission] produce a spectrum of neutron energies, but the peak of that spectrum (the most number of neutrons produced) is around 0.7MeV, the average being about 1.9MeV
That is, the short answer is that existing fission reactors just don't produce enough neutrons that have enough energy to convert mercury isotopes
Makes perfect sense, thank's for writing it all out!
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23hr ago
The problem isn’t birthrates, it’s excess deaths and emigration. The population is much lower because people who didn’t flee are being killed in the war. And keep in mind that win or lose, the population will not be enough to weather another invasion later on.
functor
23hr ago
I have never understood why green parties are woke. Their ideology is naturally anti woke.
Remove fossil fuels from society and you are going to have a society that reflects that material basis. A society without fossil fuels doing most of the work is reliant on male physical strength. If agriculture is going to be entirely organic and sustainable people are going to be skinny. Much of feminism builds on people leaning on the state or insurance companies for their old age and care instead of family. Social structures are seen as oppressive by the left if people can recieve a pension and be cared for by the state. A large state that takes care of people requires industrial civilization. Without a huge state people need families, children, and social structures for support.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
23hr ago
However, Russia also has plenty of militarily eminently sensible moves that it has not taken yet, presumably because of Western sensibilities
Yep, the number of bridges across the Dnieper is quite limited, and yet they haven't been taken out, nor have the railroad hubs in Western Ukraine been covered with petal landmines.
Being monolingual isn't a stable situation either! Languages change and evolve, and morph into new ones. I resist the urge to make sweeping pronouncements or value judgements here.
The Romans learned Greek for centuries even after their own uncontested dominance. Latin was a mark of class and a scholarly language for tens of generations after it had died out in common use.
Surely you have some good experience with this process as an Indian who writes long internet articles in English?
India has almost as many languages as gods. Very few of them have died for good, and those that did were closer to tiny dialects with a few hundreds or thousands of speakers. I don't think any language that had a million speakers or more in living memory has died out, even if there's been a trend of consolidation with English and Hindi. A lot of people speak their native tongue as usual, but write it using Latin characters. There's no clear trend of one particular language sweeping everything else away.
I'm not sure what we're arguing about, this conversation has veered far away from what I criticized as flaws in the grandparent comment. I have no objection to the claim that people who learn multiple languages tend to be better at a few and only passable at others. That's obviously true.
The question is why. The comment far above claims that it's because languages are mutually exclusive, learning one necessarily takes away from the others.
I say this isn't true. If you take math and history lessons, learning more history won't make you worse at math, but you will obviously not learn as much math as someone who hyperfocused on it.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
23hr ago
I agree that good games (even great games) are still to be found, especially from indie devs. My observation is just that there has been a decrease over time in the rate of getting those great games. Early on (like in the 80s), devs were strongly limited by technology, but in the 90s they started to be unshackled from those limitations and were putting out incredible games that blew everything before them away. Doom, Fallout, the various Infinity Engine games, FF6, FF7, Deus Ex, Starcraft, Alpha Centauri, etc etc. And that torrent of classics kept up for a good long while. But at some point it slowed down - around 2010 is where the inflection point seemed to me to be. Not that we don't get classics any more (we do, some of my favorite games are from after the golden age), but that something changed and now (to make up some numbers) 20% of the games are classic instead of 60%. We can still get a lot of great games while it also being true that we get fewer than before
I suspect that the primary driver here is because AAA game development has become way too expensive and time-consuming. When it takes 5-10 years and a team of 200 people to make the game, there's always going to be pressure to play it safe so as to recoup the investment. Not to mention that long dev times hurt because games (like other software) benefit a lot from iteration. If you make a game in a year or two, you can test out your ideas and learn from your mistakes so much faster than at the current pace of AAA dev. And I bet that this is why so many of the great games in recent memory have been indie games. Free of the constraints their AAA colleagues face, they can focus more on quality for their intended audience than safe broad appeal. They can iterate faster and dial in what makes the best games. But even though the indie devs still knock it out of the park a lot, time was that all the devs were doing that! It really does strike me as a golden age that we aren't quite experiencing any more.
The US has been the Great Satan from Day 1.
Day 1 of the revolution to oust a CIA backed dictator that was installed to thwart the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by a democratically elected Prime Minister, that is.
The Persians have plenty of legitimate historical grievance against Anglo-Americans, let's not pretend otherwise. But they could probably let it all go if their main regional rival didn't have such strong military ties with the US.
TowardsPanna
23hr ago
Wait what? I never heard about Lovelace being in Civ before now. A mathematician and "the first computer programmer". They have no business making her a leader of a nation. Or several nations across history, as is the case in 7.
But on the note of how to label these 'woke practices', I have started thinking it's more about female chauvinism/favoring women than about merely increasing diversity.
Green parties in Europe reflect the policy priorities of highly-educated, middle class but not rich rich hippies.
This is true in Germany, in Britain and elsewhere. In practice their policies typically involve:
Limiting new housing construction on ecological grounds (good for NIMBYs and accepted by progressive students who think all pricing problems in housing have nothing to do with demand and are just because of ‘evil landlords’, who the Greens promise to deal with in vague terms).
Limiting any infrastructure development (especially airports and roads) - again good for NIMBYs / BANANAs and supported idiotically by young progressive college graduates who imagine cancelling this funding is some blow against the nebulous ‘rich’ who are both greedy and destroying the environment for sport.
Generic progressive positions on immigration, race, foreign policy etc as adapted to the circumstances of the broad left in their country and region, with none of the pesky non-college-going native working class who are still present in the established center-left parties.
Welfareism targeted specifically towards the young(ish). Greens certainly aren’t opposed to welfare for the old (pensions / social security) or children (tax credits etc), but will focus on growing the welfare state to cater more to college students and graduates, especially those destined for low wage careers.
Essentially they are parties for people who rarely encounter the underclass, and so have no resentment for them, but do often encounter the affluent as well as fellow young people on upwardly mobile career trajectories toward whom they bear a great deal of resentment.
For example, a typical Green-voting family in the Anglosphere:
Two highly educated parents, possibly retired, one [formerly] a publisher at an academic press or a teacher, the other one an academic in the humanities or soft social sciences or a therapist with a client list of middle aged women. Live a comfortable life in an outer suburban affluent town in a house they bought in 1992, now asset rich, cash OK but enough to vacation regularly and support their kids a little.
Their two kids; one a NEET / part time barista in a band who studied music at a conservatory for a few years before dropping out; the other a college graduate junior project manager at an NGO reliant on a government ministry for funding working on wildlife protection legislation that is itself funded by a levy on construction companies. Both kids rent is ‘supported’ by their parents, who are worried about them ever becoming self-sufficient and think the state should step in rather than letting all those fat cat bankers and lawyers take all the money.
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