domain:traditionsofconflict.com
NullHypothesis
13m ago
Thanks, fixed.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13m ago
It’s more relevant than PPP, that’s for sure. China is a fairly poor country, comparable with Mexico or Argentina. People have been saying that China will “catch up” to the US for years, but it’s never panned out. It’s looking like China has peaked in terms of GDP growth rate, and they didn’t even manage to achieve a Japanese or South Korean level of wealth before doing so.
Ethan
Quality assurance
14m ago
Do you have recommendations as far as recipes go, for making veggies taste good and making you actively want to eat them?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
22m ago
PPP is a bad indicator when you’re talking about strategic power, and it’s not even a particularly good way to compare relative economic power.
As far as integrating rural residents into the economy: they have. There are more Han twice as many urban as there are rural Chinese these days, and there’s a point where you hit diminishing returns on taking rural peasants and turning them into factory workers. At the moment China has a significant unemployment problem, and already “integrated” workers are having trouble finding jobs as it is.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
26m ago
One of the post is just taking a simple argument and making it 5k words … My definition of very bad writing when you just go for length
In all likelihood, the post does contain more information than could be compressed into 200 words. It’s pretty hard to write coherent, sensible sentences that literally say nothing, unless you really go out of your way to do it.
Typically when people say that writing “uses too many words” or “says nothing”, what they actually mean is that there is content there, but they simply find the content to be trite, false, uninteresting, irrelevant, etc. All of which may be valid criticisms. But that’s different from there being no content at all.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
29m ago
Slaughtering herds does not create calories, it destroys them. Pig herds in China are not competing with grain production, they’re adding to the food supply by turning imported feed into pork. It is not like you kill all the pigs and then you can turn those pig farms into rice farms: just about everywhere in China that can be farmed for rice is currently being farmed for rice. There is a shortage of undeveloped arable land in China right now. If you kill slaughter all the pigs you don’t reduce the caloric needs of the nation: the caloric need remains the same, and the supply of calories has gone down.
What’s more, China’s agriculture depends in part on foreign imports of fertilizer and farm equipment. With those cut off (by sea, the most efficient way to transport bulk goods) you can’t expect Chinese grain production to stay the same.
And saying any of those things, I would expect Blues to disagree vociferously on all counts and throw out all sorts of reasons why I was wrong and uncharitable.
Among the books he wrote, Thomas Sowell said that his favorite is A Conflict of Visions. I believe the theory put forward in that book best explains this observation.
The factors that determine which side of a political fence we are on are not based on dialectic; they adhere mainly at the level of one's vision of the world -- the way one sees things -- which consists of categories and concepts and their semantics, along with values and biases (aka, in Bayesian terms, priors). If we do not start from the same set of categories, concepts, and semantics, it doesn't even make sense to talk in terms of starting from the same set of facts, let alone the same values and biases. A vision acts a stage upon which the play of dialectic is put on. If two people share a vision they can participate in profitable dialectic with each other; and if they do not, they cannot.
But this doesn't mean it the situation is hopeless. Most persuasive dialogue outside of academia is, in fact, not dialectic but proselytization, aimed at massaging the listener's vision: their categories, concepts, semantics, priors, and values -- things that have no truth conditions and thus admit no logical or empirical arguments. This sort of dialog is the only kind that can promulgate or harmonize the visions of a community. Unfortunately, Enlightenment thinkers generally scoff at it. Frankly, in large part so do the Motte and other "rationality" communities on both the left and right -- labeling it as "fuzzy thinking", "superstition", "indoctrination", etc. Thus, as C.S. Lewis wrote, "We remove the organ and demand the function... we castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." Good luck with that.
jeroboam
52m ago
Here's one, although the price went up a little so it has slightly less than 2x net cash/market cap right now.
hydroacetylene
52m ago
Europe didn’t need tobacco, sugar, chocolate, indigo, and all the rest. But upon discovering these things, there was enough upfront demand to convince the merchant class that new world colonies would earn a profit.
What demand for an entire asteroid’s worth of platinum is up-front enough to convince someone to fund anything as expensive as asteroid mining? I guess you could postulate some new room temperature superconductor/cold fusion process relying on it, but then you’re firmly in the realm of science fiction.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
What are blue tribe normies like?
I have a pretty good vision in my head of red tribers. Into music that plays on the country station, whether or not it’s country, he drives a truck if he can afford it(and sometimes if he can’t), might tell black jokes but isn’t particularly racist, big believer in the benefits of sports even if not actually a participant therein, thinks the anti-trump law fare is trumped up BS, she thinks she should be into gardening and babies even if she’s not, everyone believes Christianity is true even if not really practicing or a strict literalist, etc.
What are normie blue tribers like? Like I’m pretty sure resistance twitterati are not very representative.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1hr ago
I don't think I've seen any clarity from the mods on whether stating such beliefs are against the rules.
Implying someone is "hiding their power level" (i.e. concealing their true beliefs) is not in itself cause for a ban. It is, once again, more about tone (how you say it) than about the specific accusation. Are you trying to engage someone or are you just trying to "call them out" or bait them into flaming back?
Once more: Hlynka's ban wasn't any one post (even if it was one post to which his permaban was eventually attached). It was a pattern of behavior going back years in which he would continually behave in an antagonistic manner, we would tell him to please stop doing that, and he would (sometimes explicitly) tell us that he was not going to stop doing that because he thought his principles and how he thought the Motte should be run were more important than Zorba's policies or our wishes. And you know, fair enough. In a sense I respect that he stood on his principles. But he did so knowing we were going to ban him, because we told him we were going to ban him if he didn't stop flagrantly violating the rules and all but thumbing his nose at us. In his calmer moments he would even tell us that he understood why we kept modding him (but that he wasn't going to stop doing what he was doing).
A long term good poster and someone with a lot of respect in the community absolutely refused to abide by the rules. Eventually, after many, many bans of escalating severity and pleading with him to knock it off or go touch grass, he got banned for good because we were tired of this dance (and of people asking us why Hlynka got to get away with so much).
Hlynka committed "Suicide by janny."
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
If you live in the USA, you should contact an enrolled agent, or CPA or attorney specializing in tax, to figure out how to report this to the IRS. In other countries it’s probably a just a lawyer.
sliders1234
1hr ago
Interesting that I think a few of those posts are bad or just not special. One of the post is just taking a simple argument and making it 5k words while still ignoring to address the criticisms that are evident in a 200 word synopsis. My definition of very bad writing when you just go for length.
Another I thought was just stringing together a few hot takes. Which I don’t think is generally bad because it can be a starting point for bringing up an issue but I wouldn’t consider for a quality contribution because it lacked specialized or depth of knowledge on the issue.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1hr ago
Carrier strike groups, or the planes launched from them, still need to get close to be useful - close enough that you could find them with clouds of cheap drones flying WWII-style search patterns (China has overwhelming manufacturing advantage there) or radar. I don't see why China would need to strike them while they are circling out in the open Pacific, if they can't do anything significant to interfere from out there because they have no significant quantity of weaponry in the intersection of "gets past layered air defence" (something that China will have in its own vicinity and the US won't) and "finds its target". Taiwan, too, has layered air defense and proximity, but without the US being able to bring much to the table anymore it would just get overwhelmed.
The point, I think, is more in that the US must know and fear this possibility; a loss of its space-based recon and targeting would spell trouble not just in Taiwan but in every other theatre (would Ukraine or Israel be able to hold on without their current ability to be forewarned of any troop concentration and surface construction ability almost immediately?). My lay sense would be that yielding Taiwan and trying to make the best of the outcome would be better for global US power prospects than yielding the space advantage and fighting for Taiwan, even if the latter fought can somehow be won (as in Taiwan stays independent and US-aligned).
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1hr ago
Stop posting low effort comments like this. I'm actually happy to see someone defending the verdict and pushing back on what's clearly a dominant opinion here (this is completely orthogonal to what I personally think of the verdict) and it's unfortunate that the only pushback is coming from someone whose responses can mostly be summarized as "Neener neener."
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1hr ago
have this site keep being viewed as a joke by actually smart people.
I'm tempted to ask where all these "smart people" are whose opinions we're supposed to care about, but I don't really care.
So why ban Tomato for writing a mild few paragraphs poking fun at his political opponents?
Because poking fun at your political opponents is not what this place is for.
You have a long record of exactly the sort of comments this place is not for, and since you went full I Am Very Smart with a post you surely knew would result in a ban, why don't you go find smarter pastures that are more fitting for your intellectual caliber?
You have one AAQC and a bunch of warnings and (remarkably) only one previous ban. I'm giving you a one week ban, but I strongly suggest you decide whether you want to return if this level of sneering really reflects how you feel.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
1hr ago
Just how much weight did you pull over? I busted my shoulder attempting a bridge and have been doing careful pullovers ever since: good ROM, but depressed scapulae.
Shrike
1hr ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it's the US that makes the first move against satellites in a Pacific war: aircraft carrier battlegroups are actually pretty hard to locate if you don't have any imaging or radar satellites in orbit.
I agree that taking out the huge US satellite constellations will degrade US war fighting capabilities, but in a Pacific war over Taiwan I suspect a Kessler syndrome asymmetrically helps the United States: China is surrounded by Taiwan, South Korea and Japan in a ring, and their naval and shore-based assets will be able to track Chinese naval activity, identify it for targeting, and communicate that to US bomber strike packages originating from well outside China's effective reach. Meanwhile, the US carrier fleet will be free to steam in circles in the middle of nowhere, Pacific, and China will have to resort to trying to locate them with submarines, recon aircraft, and possibly ELINT (very fun and fancy until the carrier turns off its radios). It's possible there's some other options I haven't thought of, but the long and short of things is that targeting a ship at sea is much easier with orbital assets and much harder otherwise.
I also think it's worth considering that the US has a lot of nuclear-strike-warning orbital assets, so hitting US satellites indiscriminately may send the signal that you're planning to go ballistic in the nuclear way – but those same assets are helpful for all sorts of stuff, with resolutions sensitive enough to pinpoint the release of small weapons. I assume if you're China you just shoot them down anyway.
I should note that there are a lot of soft-kill ways to deal with satellites and (additionally) plenty of hard-kill ways that don't result in massive debris clouds. That doesn't mean people won't create said debris clouds – either because they're just using basic ASAT missiles or to make it harder for the US to simply putting more assets in orbit with its massive edge in earth-to-orbit transport.
YE_GUILTY
1hr ago
That would be how one probably has to do it. But let's see: China's 2007 ASAT test was carried out with a modified medium-range ballistic missile with a ground range of about 4000 km. That's not going to reach 20000 km altitude; I don't think even an ICBM could get up there. Probably it would take individual killer-satellites, launched on one space rocket apiece, which would themselves be much more vulnerable to existing ASAT weaponry before they reach their targets. Probably not cost-effective.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
1hr ago
There are two possible reasons for that:
- the cops were there to make sure that "the nazis behave themselves", so when they saw an altercation, they were predisposed to see them as the attackers
- they simply missed the start of the fight and saw a three-on-one fight
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
It would be far better if we only convicted those who were properly stigmatized.
Southkraut
Phoning in my existence.
2hr ago
Conservative papers like Welt tend to go easy on the culture war. Not sure whether it's to avoid alienating moderate readers, to uphold standards of objective journalism, or because "one crow won't peck out another's eyes", as we say - journalists probably want to avoid becoming non grata by taking the wrong side of history.
Openly rightist media like Junge Freiheit or Tichys Einblick may say the quiet part out loud, but have barely any readership and reach at all. So alright, I may have phrased it poorly - they do call it out, but nobody hears it.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2hr ago
If that's the case, it might still be possible to ASAT them individually because there are so few?
5434a
2hr ago
Around 2015/16 Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as a result of different views over how large the blocks in the blockchain should be.
They did this by creating a fork in the blockchain where, after the date of the fork, all the transactions on one chain would be incompatible on the other chain. So if you bought BCH you could transact on the BCH chain, but not on the BTC chain, and vice versa.
However the blockchain prior to the fork is the exact same ledger for both BTC and BCH. So if you had a balance of 1 "coin" on the BTC ledger before the fork then after the fork you'll have a balance of 1 coin on the BTC ledger and a balance of 1 coin on the BCH ledger too, because it references the same transaction history. I hope that makes sense.
The upshot is that if you have a BTC balance from prior to the fork you have the same balance on all the chains that have forked from that same ledger.
Last time I looked, which was quite a while ago, BCH was worth about 1/10 of BTC, but BTC had gone up at least 10x so it's worth following up. You'd need to read up on the proper procedure to do it though because if you send your pre-fork BTC to someone without splitting the BCH out first you're essentially sending them both. I'm about at the limit of my hazy, hungover, half-remembered knowledge at this point.
There were a bunch of other chain splits, from the seemingly more serious minded ones like Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (BSV) through to the more scammy looking ones that seemed to be just riding the brand name through the crypto hype wave, like Bitcoin Diamond (current value 7 cents). I think BSV forked from BCH, so the same principle applies there.
TLDR It's complicated and you should do some thorough research on before moving your coins. Many of the forked chains are practically worthless but a few of them, while worth less than BTC, are still worth a good bit of money on account of how much the whole market has risen since the date of the fork.
Here's an old article about one of the forks that explains it better and might offer some terms to search https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/beginners-guide-surviving-coin-split. Looks like searching "Bitcoin split" tends to return results about Bitcoin's regular mining reward halving which is totally different. Hope that helps you get started, my information is hugely incomplete and possibly wildly out of date!
Yeah, and as in Europe the position on immigration and borders is a big negative for them in SA.
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