domain:sotonye.substack.com
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
I completely agree.
I would add that having defensive alliances between nuclear and non-nuclear states is a great boon to non-proliferation. Being in NATO is very much preferable from owning a few nukes, but if NATO membership was not an option for former east block states (like Poland, whose past experience with Russia/USSR would make them wary), then these states might have started pursuing nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR.
However, the Ukraine war also shows that nukes are not the "I win" button. Instead, the button is labeled "Fuck you, fuck me, fuck everyone". Threatening to press it outside the most existential crisis of a regime is not credible, for the most part. (The death star gambit, to blow up whichever polity annoyed you most from time to time pour encourager les autres might or might not work.)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
16hr ago
Whats the "ussri" name about btw?
It's a frankly terrible pun that came to me in a dream. Possibly something to do with fully automated luxury space communism, with the homosexuality optional.
I dont think Bayes theorem requires its numbers to be independent (whatever it would mean for a conditional to be independent of its condition).
Oops. Not sure how that snuck it, the whole point is to find out conditionals and manipulate conditionals.
As far as I know, beard minoxidil doesnt need to be kept up. Androgenic hair is easy to get and usually sticks around.
I believe you're right, but minoxidil takes ages to show good effect. What I mean isn't that he's forced to keep it up while at risk of losing it all when he stops, but rather that he wanted it to get denser and denser, which takes a while.
Going bald is traumatic because it absolutely traumatic and if you dont lie to yourself, it is very easily avoidable. I posted about this a few weeks ago and the response I got were not very good. If you are suffering from Male Pattern Baldness, see your dermat, pop finasteride (take it topically if you are afraid) and dont read about potential side effects, plenty get them via the placebo effect or something. I look normal now, I still did when I was receeding but getting it fixed at the right time did a lot of good to me.
It is somewhat preventable, but the results of finasteride and dutasteride vary. I started balding at 18, went on finasteride and the balding stopped it for a couple years, then hair loss accelerated, I got on dutasteride and now I'm in my early 30s and the hair loss is starting to get pretty bad.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
17hr ago
I've been away, I still read from time to time, but not nearly as much as I used to. Maybe I'll do a pass through once or twice a week.
I still love the motte. But life/work/relationship is a lot of work.
aardvark2
17hr ago
after a century or two we will have selected for people who will reproduce in spite of pressure to the contrary.
evolution doesn't work that way, there must be alleles for that trait, if they are not there, then no matter what selection pressure be, it would not evolve.
Sloot
17hr ago
Women surprisingly don't feel the affects of temperature when they have to wear revealing clothes.
“have to”
Forced by socialization and the patriarchy, I presume.
The female desire to be sex objects outweighs the female sensitivity to the cold. A version of this takes place every day in offices across the world, where chicks will wear outfits to showoff their bodies then complain it’s too cold.
09milk
17hr ago
Or just buy the tech from France (and in some way Canada) like how most new nuclear country does it, then assemble a few actual working one before you develope the in house tech and logistic to build more
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
17hr ago
Haven't seen you in a while. Maybe just different threads?
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Yes, joining the military is a great way to start a career. Pick something with ‘technician’ or whatever in the title as an MOS so there’ll be a job waiting for you once you leave.
It kinda sounds like you’re in an economically depressed area.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Tradesmen are mostly honest about their jobs not being fun, but do them for the pay premium, not the promise of a license for rent seeking(which is what a master card is).
The most important reason for every sane countries to defence Ukraine is nuclear non-proliferation.
Gaddafi served as the original prime counter-example of nuclear non-proliferation. Obama et al. can still marginally justify the action with human right violation (to which, as a realist, I totally disagree, in my opinion they should protect Gaddafi at all cost, to set the example of what the world are willing to do for you with the virtue of giving up nuclear)
Ukraine now being the newest example of why you should not give up nuke and instead one should seek it. Obama and Trump 1 failed nuclear non-proliferation by not helping Ukraine in the 2014 Crimean war with everything they can, under the context of Budapest Memorandum. If the Budapest Memorandum failed to protect Ukraine's border, what is the point of giving up nukes?
Then 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War started and once again, Biden and Trump 2 failed them by not protecting Ukraine's border after they give up nuke, and in some way what Biden demostrated by not wanting to esculate with Russia, and what Trump 2 is demostrating with his esculating action against Iran, is that nuclear weapons will protect you
With these 2 ongoing conflicts, there is no way any rational non-nuke country support nuclear non-proliferation anymore, any real support of such is basically treason.
It would not surprise me if more are secreatly developing nukes now, and announce the possesion of nuclear weapons in 10-15 years, or even attempt to deceive others by announcing the possesion while not actually have one or announce it to gain time while only being close to getting one.
Edit 1: For everyone how said Ukraine don't have the launch code: There is a saying that government with access to nuclear weapons is more stable from oursiders due to the risk of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorist. If terrorists are said to be capable of using nuclear weapons from arbitrary country, a functioning industrialized economy with actual nuclear weapon engineers and nuclear scientist, should be able to make use of those USSR nukes
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
I haven’t heard that- what I have heard was that such jobs wouldn’t hire women with children/married women, full stop.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Do you mind unfiltering this guy?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
17hr ago
This is obviously not true though? Men can look fine/good without hair but hair is obviously better. Shaved is usually better than balding but nothing beats a full head of healthy hair.
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
Alternately, build them with native talent(after all, Pakistan managed it, we can assume most major non-African countries have the ability to do so) and don’t publicize it until you’re done. Or just buy one from Pakistan.
I live in the Middle East (Dubai), so anything below 30 °C is considered great weather here (It gets up to 50C here and its not even peak summer yet!). Winters here are genuinely pleasant. Sunny, temps around 17-22 degrees, and not too dry or too cold.
But yeah, I can relate to being confused at people hating the rain and liking the sun. I can't tolerate heat at all. I'd go as far to say I LOVE the cold.
The most "liveable" weather, in my opinion, is cold (5 to 10 °C) nights and cool (10 to 15 °C) days. With some rain, some cloud, some sun to mix it all up. This was how Stepantsminda, Georgia was during September when I visited last year, and I loved being outdoors.
But being a guy who grew up in the Middle East, there is a novelty factor to cold weather. I loved Tokyo in Jan (0 to 5C for the most part) and NYC in Jan (-3 to 3C) for the most part. Tokyo, especially, was very nice in the winter. It was dry, sunny, and not windy. NYC felt damper and gloomier, but I still liked it.
Sapporo in January (-10 to -5 °C) was a bit uncomfortable, but I still spent most of the day outdoors. Also, if you want a winter wonderland aesthetic (piles and piles of snow, icicles, frozen lakes, daily/hourly snowfall, ski town vibes) like no other, visit Sapporo; it's amazing, and the food too.
aeqno
18hr ago
The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
AvocadoPanic
18hr ago
Do you believe that Tim Waltz actually directed this man to kill state politicians to clear up seats for him to run for the Senate?
No, but also isn't that what a Keyser Söze or John List would want us to think.
Turok's previous writing is almost perfectly incompatible with the goals of the Motte. It's often witty but insincere (I enjoy his trolling of r/AITA quite a bit). It's also marred by elliptical insults that are often rooted in failed cold reads. For example, the "didn't you see 'Alt' in my flair?" schtick presumes an interlocutor easily gulled by shibboleths that aren't really a thing here.
Imaginary_Knowledge
19hr ago
It's very simple: when the pro-vaccine side began censoring, they lost all credibility. I don't care what these alleged studies say. I assume they're poisoned and discard them, because the people publishing them used the state to censor anything contrary.
There is nothing they can say to me that would prompt me to read their work much less change my mind on the vaccine
zeke5123a
19hr ago
I agree the dude just appears to be totally nuts. In a way that’s the best outcome.
Your sense of suspicion at all these competing narratives reminds me of my own experiences, though perhaps my upbringing was even more atypical. I grew up in Malaysia and came into contact with many parts of the culture there, but was raised by parents who'd spent time in Britain and who homeschooled me in a very different environment than most other people would ever experience. I knew people who were staunchly Christian and prayed often to the Lord, de facto Taoists who actively made offerings to spirits and arranged their homes in line with feng shui geomantic principles, staunch atheists that somehow still clung to hints of superstition here and there, and so on. When I was sixteen, I moved to Australia (where I now live) and interacted with yet another cultural milieu.
A consequence of this strange muddled background is that I notice I don't really feel kinship with any way of thinking and virtually never identify with any major group or subculture, so there's this persistent tendency for me to feel like an alien wherever I go. I travel for fun a lot and come into contact with a lot of people from different cultural backgrounds, and it often seems like the way they mentally structure and interpret the world are completely incongruent with each other.
Anyway, reality (at least from our perspective) isn't so much an elephant as it is a Necker cube. There are two possible 3d interpretations of this cube, but we can't see both views at once since the interpretations are so diametrically opposed to each other that it's impossible to maintain both orientations in our minds at once. Yes, there is the problem of the Elephant, where different people come across different information about the world and draw different conclusions about it on that basis, but even when everyone agrees on the fundamental factual points of contention there is inevitably going to be subjectivity in how one puts them together and fits them into an internal narrative of the world.
Oftentimes we don't have direct access to seemingly simple things like cause and effect (insert quote about how all science is actually just correlation here) and even the same data points can lead to wildly different understandings of the world depending on the system interpreting them. At this point we can model quantum phenomena very well but what it actually implies is untestable and completely beyond us. So much of what we know about reality lies on the surface of a black box. We don't and perhaps will never have direct access to many aspects of how things work, and until that happens I suspect it will be like the Necker cube: analysing a 3d object through the lens of a 2d plane, and debating how it's actually oriented. There is a capital-T Truth out there, but whether that's accessible to us or not is another question.
That's before we can even get into things like moral outlook, which... well that's a crapshoot. Hume's is-ought problem still remains intractable today. I seriously doubt an AGI would be able to synthesise many aspects of worldview together as a result; there will always be big Unknowns (in more domains than people think, IMO) where all we can do is gesticulate at an answer.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20hr ago
I heard that if you ask Deepseek R1 about the Ukraine war in English, it'll give you the US story. If you ask in Russian, it puts on it's Z-armband and give the Russian story. But then R1 is not AGI.
Also, consider historiography. There is no way to turn an enormous depth of known facts into a narrative without simplifying or taking some kind of perspective. You can't give 'what actually happened' without boring your audience senseless, you need to identify the salient facts. There can be more or less true narratives of course but a universal narrative is very, very hard to swallow.
cae_jones
20hr ago
I'd say it's more "emotionally abusive MLM" than Jim Jones. It isn't the affection that gets me; it's how much it reminds me of the legendary Bay-area Rationalist cuddle culture.
But mostly, after attending a couple workshops and listening to the other people there, I'm increasingly convinced that it's stoking suffering while claiming to improve situations, kinda like what therapy has become, only worse by using charismatic church tactics and emotional intensity to convince people it feels amazing and must therefore be working.
One question I feel is underexplored is, to what extent would things have gone differently for a hypothetical nuclear-armed Ukraine? It seems plausible enough that in the first few weeks of the conflict, when Russia was actually aiming for the jugular, Nuclear Ukraine could have countered with a credible nuclear threat. However, if Ukraine magicked up a full nuclear triad now, would much of anything change? That is, would it be able to credibly threaten MAD to demand back Crimea and Donbass alone? (I don't think so. It seems pretty obvious that the more realistic form of their current war goals - EU and NATO membership for a rump state minus approximately what Russia has taken, plus or minus some more parts of Donbass - is too valuable to go va banque over, plus the West has an enduring interest in maintaining the nuclear-strike taboo lest the End of History gets undone any further.) Consequently, could it have credibly threatened MAD when Russia grabbed Crimea? ...when it supported the Donbass separatists in uprising? ...if, instead of doing the push for Kiev, Russia only had blitzed for the territory it controls now from the start, declaring that it wants to seize a buffer zone for Crimea and the Donbass separatists? In the worst case, Ukrainian nukes would merely have stopped Russia from making its grand opening mistake (blowing its confidence and certain classes of special force reserves on a useless operation).
Ukraine's fundamental dilemma is that while the EU/NATO exists and is friendly to it, it is very hard for it to credibly signal that it has its back to the wall; but if the EU/NATO backstop were to disappear, it would become very hard for it to marshal the will and unifying purpose to resist Russia.
More options
Context Copy link