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How so? Under Saddam it had less Iranian influence, and it wouldn't have suffered somewhere between a half million and a million unnecessary deaths and a commensurate amount of permanently handicapped.

It's hard to find an equivalent country to look at path of development, Syria is obvious but Syria wouldn't look like it does today absent the Iraq war. Probably Iran is the downside estimate assuming poor governance and continued isolation, and Iran is about as well off as Iraq without the atrocities.

It doesn't nessesarily imply big-O Eastern Orthodoxy, but it does imply adherence to small-o Nicene orthodoxy, which nessesitates an organized church under a valid bishop.

The whole experience in Iraq (reasonably), makes people suspicious of Americas ability to influence other countries in a positive way

Even Iraq is probably better off than it was under Saddam. Certainly better off than it would have been under his sons. Afghanistan not so much.

I don’t know, I think the risks of global totalitarian government are way, way higher if China becomes the premier global power.

I’ll just go ahead and stake out the position which is that the US actually does respect the rights of its citizens more than basically any country in the world (maybe Switzerland or the Nordics are better?) and certainly more than china or any of their allies. In addition to that the us really does try and encourage its allies to democratize. Places like South Korea, are imperfect, but far better than what they were earlier in my lifetime. The whole experience in Iraq (reasonably), makes people suspicious of Americas ability to influence other countries in a positive way, but imo that should be viewed as more of an exception than a rule.

I also believe that the us national security / intelligence apparatus is mostly well intentioned / a good thing. Are they perfect, no, but it seems like they are pretty good at answering the elected president’s political appointees.

Yeah, Musk may be crazy and I was never a fan even back in the days when he was being worshipped as a god of tech, but he does have a Vision and a Plan. He does want to build electric vehicles. He does want to build self-driving cars. He does want to build private, reusable space vehicles. He does want to colonise Mars.

Most other high-paying, multi-million salary CEO jobs are "Tom Bimble left Wahoo! and has now joined MegaMart, replacing Tim Bamble who has gone to Wahoo!" Interchangeable guys who didn't found the company, weren't there for its rapid growth phase, and whose job is basically "don't run it into the ground, but even if you do, your contract ensures a golden parachute".

That's where the resentment comes in: I screw up in my job, I get fired. CEO Tim screws up, he is the cause of a lot of people losing their jobs, but the terms of his contract means he walks away with a million-dollar pension and may well walk into a new job.

Non-proper noun, that’s a claim of adherence to basic, fundamental Christian beliefs; not membership in a proper-noun Orthodox church.

I guess if you wanted to grill him, you could ask whether or not he believes in the Apostles’ Creed, and whether or not he believes the filioque clause belongs in the Nicene Creed.

At which point a lot of them will learn about union dues, and another bunch will learn that even Starbucks customers have limits on how much they'll pay for a latte.

I wondered if he might have swerved towards some branch of Orthodoxy, given his use of Greek theological terms, but as you say the gay thing does rule against it. Plus the warning about Caesaropapism, given that the prime example of that was the Byzantine church and the Eastern Churches in general don't think that Councils can be called without the authority of the Emperor (who is no more, unless we all accept Trump as the new Emperor?)

Warning Vance against the pope is very funny and possibly tongue-in-cheek, given the memes about pope Francis' death very soon after meeting Vance.

Comments like this make me suspect anti-urbanists have no idea what dense urban areas are actually like. I live five minutes from a full-sized grocery with substantial better (and higher quality) selection than Wal Mart is going to give me.

There isn't a full-sized grocery store in Manhattan. There are a few in Philadelphia, but very few people are within 5 minutes of them.

I going to say, 99.9% joking, that Thiel may be WELS-Lutheran. My wife was raised in the WELS, and the latter believe that — not the individual — but the seat of the Pope is the Antichrist.

(The WELS are also exceedingly unecumenical, and are instructed not to pray with anyone outside their synod.)

Sounds like a setup for a common joke.

Schwab's vision comes to pass but

The food is the same, only more expensive, lesser in variety and the "local stores" are merely subsidiaries of WalMart

The waistline is also the same

The sidewalks are barely navigable due to the kiosks trying to sell you something, the crowds, and the homeless beggars

The parks are dilapidated, the trees are dead (having cracked all the sidewalks before giving up the ghost), and the parks are dominated by drug users and/or aggressive panhandlers.

The commute is by bus, but there is no safety.

And when you ask Schwab about the utopian world he promised... "Oh, zat was zhust ze demo."

Notably missing among the horsemen of anti-science are ...the Christian right who oppose stem cell research"

Embryonic stem cell research yes, adult stem cell no.

"and CRISPRing fetuses."

Oooh, ooooh! That are me? Me am Antichrist? Yay! Fame at last!

still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible ...Almost nobody was openly atheist in 18th century Europe."

I would like to see more development of this point. I think he's referring to The Enlightenment when open atheism did become a thing, that's when we get a lot of writings by revolutionaries and radicals (see Shelley, though that's early 19th century, and of course Voltaire with his "is he/isn't he" flirting at least with atheism). So I would be interested for his reasons as to why he thinks science and atheism are not compatible.

Theism increases the risk of some moral failings and perhaps lowers the risk of others, but the correlation is not so robust that I would really care about it"

Would you care to expand on that? Seeing as I'm in the running for Antichrist due to my retrograde religious views, I need moral guidance from those of superior virtue (that is only half-sarcastic; an outside view is always useful and I would like to see if your notion of the theistic vices line up with what I think you would say are the theistic vices).

That would do it. Where I live the residential tower blocks often have at least one commercial outlet on the ground floor, such as groceries, barbershops, hardware store, etc. That's in the suburbs - in the city center the ground floor is often entirely businesses.

Not true; Singapore is a Star Alliance state

Generally, US zoning strictly separates residential uses like single-family houses and apartment buildings and commercial uses like supermarkets and convenience stores. Ultra-dense places like New York City may allow apartment buildings and convenience stores to exist in the same zone, but they are relatively rare.

For a representative example of zoning that might be used by a random town in the US, see the International Zoning Code. For a comprehensive comparison of US and foreign zoning, see Zoned in the USA.

Due to population densities, that isn’t true- most ancestral humans have been peasant farmers because hunter-gatherers had very low populations.

Do you think non union tradesmen get out of their trade very often? A non union plumber will not cut a hole in the floor, redo Sheetrock/tile, penetrate a roof for a vent, etc. Just like his union counterpart, he’ll write a quote to have it subcontracted and he comes back to do the job.

I know the problems associated with it, but I still think they should have brought back the clean and press when they redid the weight-classes in weightlifting. In its modern form the lifters are very explosive and athletic looking, but there's not really an event in the Olympics that has a pure test of static strength. I for one am willing to sacrifice the 20 km walk from the program if it means we can have the clean and press.

Race walking and clean and press suffer from the same problem, and I'd rather scrap both. At least with the race walking you can come up with some kind of shoe sensors that automatically disqualify runners, but with the clean and press? It will always be a cheater's sport.

Okay, who is his bishop?

So I recently watched Tarkovsky's Stalker, an eminently wanky, pretentious arthouse film I was fully expecting not to like. The plot is simple - three characters (the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor) conduct a pilgrimage through a wasteland called the Zone, supposedly filled with traps, to reach a room at the centre that's said to grant people their greatest desire.

I am the furthest thing from a cinephile you can imagine (I truly hate most of what New Hollywood put out, for example, and that's way less wanky than Tarkovsky), but I ended up watching the full thing and being thoroughly transfixed the whole way, and I can't really even explain why. The pacing is slothlike and tends to linger on specific moments, with an average shot length of over a minute and a total runtime of almost three hours, and not very much happens throughout the film - but there's such a dreamlike and liminal quality to the filmmaking that it doesn't really matter. The film fosters a trance-like rhythm that lulls you into a reverie and gradually accustoms you to its slow pace.

The Zone portrayed in the movie feels downright haunted, in spite of little that's overtly supernatural in it; the site is overrun with overgrown tanks from previous aborted military expeditions into the area, and abandoned industrial structures that were built on the site before it became anomalous. All the characters, particularly the Stalker, treat the area with a certain reverence, and you're constantly waiting for the Zone to react to the presence of the main characters. The film is perhaps the only one I've seen which perfectly captures the feeling of being in an empty church or temple, perhaps with all the candles somehow still lit or incense still burning, and being overcome with that ineffable sense of hallowedness which religious spaces inherently evoke. The kind of reverie which makes you feel as if you shouldn't speak loudly, because it somehow feels like doing so would be to defile the very space in which you're standing. I think the lack of any clear and explicitly spelled-out threat only intensifies that feeling, it almost creates a sense of pareidolia where you're assigning supernatural explanations onto events in the film, and given that Tarkovsky was a committed Orthodox Christian who infused the film with a lot of religious imagery, I find it hard to believe that this was not intentional.

Apparently Tarkovsky was incredibly fastidious about every shot in the movie, at one point asking that all the dandelions be picked out of a field before shooting. As such the filming process was arduous, with at least one reshoot required due to improper development of the film. An aspect of this that makes Stalker even more surreal to watch is that the production possibly killed much of the crew - all the shots in the Zone were filmed around a small river nearby a half-working hydroelectric station which was actually contaminated by a chemical plant upstream. Tarkovsky, his wife, and the actor that played the Writer all died from lung cancer after the filming of the movie.

I could analyse the movie to death (to be honest I didn't find the main thrust that difficult to glean), but it's a movie you feel in your gut more than pick apart, and as the director himself said:

Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.

In line with his filmmaking philosophy, it's a movie that's probably not going to click with everyone, and I don't think there's a coherent argument that could be made for why someone should like it. It's just a vibe.

This is something Sora 2 should help independent creators with.

People here like to sneer at litrpg as slop - that's way out of date:

https://x.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/1976740387344814365

A new type of entertainment called 'vertical drama' has emerged: shows filmed in vertical format to suit smartphone users. Each episode lasts between two and five minutes, and after a few teaser episodes you have to pay to watch the rest. The dramas are usually taken from popular web novels. A title can be produced in less than a week, and the requirements for the actors are basic: they just have to look good on camera. Nuance and subtlety are the preserve of artistic films; verticals need as many flips and twists as possible. Production is often sloppy. If a line is deemed problematic by viewers, the voice is simply muffled, without any attempt to cut or reshoot. The stories are sensational. One that has got lots of viewers excited is the supposedly forthcoming Trump Falls in Love with Me, a White House Janitor. According to an industry report, vertical drama viewers now number 696 million, including almost 70 per cent of all internet users in China. Last year the vertical market worth 50.5 billion yuan (€5 billion), surpassing movie box office revenue for the first time. It is projected to reach 85.65 billion yuan by 2027.

See this is where AI is going to make insane profits, disrupting/expanding the immensely lucrative but radically unprestigious media formats you never knew existed. Just a few minutes, no need for fancy acting or cinematography, just stimulus in your face. I bet this will come to the West too and make Netflix look like a joke. Maybe it already has.

Yeah, state of the art FAB is really only necessary for advanced autonomous functionality.

And it's not even any of the more recent AI shit, classic computer vision algorithms, millimeter wave phased array 4D radar or synthetic aperture radar just need to solve a shitload of Fourier transforms, in real time.

But it's worth noting that you can do a lot - and a lot more than we've seen in Ukraine so far - even with just 65nm.

I've lived on top of a supermarket before. It's not ideal because of all the noise, especially early morning deliveries. Lots of crashing and banging.

Thiel has stated that he is a "small o orthodox" Christian.