domain:betonit.substack.com
No_one
29d ago
All this 'stealth doesn't work' smugposting to portend the sheer stupidity of NATO in developing a white elephant
Carriers are also obsolete against peer forces who are just going to launch a hundred supersonic missiles at them a salvo of strategic air above to give planes something to dodge & overwhelm point defense and simply sink them.
That doesn't prevent them being useful against people who don't have hundreds of good ASMs on hand. That's why Chinese are building two.
If you can make a plane stealthy at a reasonable cost, it's still worth it, because it's going to make it a harder target against simple radar systems.
spam is cope when GBAD all requires a first track to be established by a radar station
Multilateration aside which is kinda not talked about much but probably works...
You ever heard of IR sensors ? Yeah, sure, you say you can hide a MW level heat source against the cold sky. No, you can't. Even Yuropoor systems like the Eurofighter have IRST that detects planes up to 50 km from the front.. You think China's unable to manufacture similar sensors and stick one on a high pole in every square 100 kms and connect them by fibre? You think unless there's total overcast, a stealth plane with a 3 MW engine on cruise can just waltz through ?
Detecting IR is 1980s technology. Most air defence now comes with it. America is refitting such on its older warplanes.
Stealth works against countries with bad equipment. That doesn't mean it's going to work against a sophisticated enemy.
epohon
29d ago
And I think I was pretty clear that I sneer at your summary of my views as a strawman. As for what I would accept as falsification, it is simple. Flourishing of common people, rather than death and immiseration. No pods, no bugs, no fifteen minutes cages.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
29d ago
Certainly the median human has "far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms... relative to what those at the top [enjoy]," and by "those at the top" I mean you and me.
The cabal seriously needs to pick up the pace, population is increasing every day and the century is nearly a quarter over.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
29d ago
I don't think you need to worry about tendinitis unless you've actually encountered it from a particular movement.
In my opinion, convincing someone to kill themselves or forcing them to kill themselves is morally the same thing.
If you are really going with "China depressed Uyghur TFR to 1.2", is suppressing their religion as being "genocide" then what's going in most of the world is also genocide. Religion is gone, TFR is in the crapper, no one is doing anything about it. The preferable solution is 'import people' to replace the dying out population.
What's true seems to be that a large % of their young males are in labor camps, there are anti-melee weapon measures everywhere (metal detectors, plastic shields, batons), there's a shit ton of police everywhere, much of them Uyghur. Strict surveillance, with people having to have tracking phone apps on.. (link worth reading, it's by a highly disagreeable person with no sympathies for either Uyghurs or Leninists.)
Which again, not nice, but unless they're getting worked to death on low rations, still not genocide. And with Chinese labor costs being as they are, I doubt they're not feeding them properly.
Now, not nice at all, but it's a just another case of 'fucking around and finding out'. Uyghurs failed to rein in their radicals, said radicals killed a couple hundred Chinese in machete attacks, caused the ongoing clampdown. Surely you remember the headlines? There was the big riot in the capital, then a half dozen big attacks in the following years.
slothlikesamwise
Subway Wizard 🔮
29d ago
Material wealth can be positive sum because we can add to it in discrete components.
Social status is innately relative, and as a function of that is innately zero sum. The lower classes have more absolute wealth than they did in 1800, but they don't have more status.
No_one
29d ago
..didn't he donate tens to low hundreds millions of dollars to ensuring Trump loses his 2nd election ?
No_one
29d ago
Sailer's was joking how funny it is that Spielberg has spend like a million bucks on luxury Italian shotguns but there's like 2 photos of him shooting one.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
We can't control who gets filtered, and the only sign in the new-comment feed that someone is filtered is a small, greyed-out icon. We try to unfilter them as soon as possible, but it's easy to miss and sometimes we do.
He had that great quote about tyrants who do it for the moral reasons, I'll give him that, but that's the entirety of my appreciation.
Among his many other virtues, his prediction of the trajectory of the sexual revolution was pretty on-point as well.
epohon
29d ago
You're misreading me, two times in a row now. The existence of wealth gap is trivially true and is no prediction at all. I'm saying that it will grow monumentally in 2100 compared to 2000, and also, this part you're completely ignoring for some reason, the absolute value of available energy and freedoms for a common person will be considerably lower in 2100 than 2000. And no, I'm not at the top even if I'm in a position to be a lazy layabout with internet and hookers, and if you're posting here, I assume neither are you. How many banks do you own?
Is there something you consider sufficient proof that the former were not reasons or at least not primary reasons, or is this an irrefutable belief?
If appearance of various "it would be great to conquer Poland" and/or "we deserve controlling USSR-sized sphere of influence" would appear in Russian popular and official discourse as often as "we should reconquer Moscow/Lithuania/Ukraine" appears in Polish one.
Then I will worry less.
Not invading neighbours, not having dropping nuclear device on Warsaw as part of exercise scenarios etc would be also good step.
Unambiguously being sorry for numerous Russian invasions, massacres and meddling would be nice but even previous steps are dead head dreams, so...
do you have any concrete evidence for the former two?
More or less see above. Putting propaganda billboards with "Russia has no borders", Putin's face and Russian flag in background is not some strong evidence but doing this kind of thing consistently over years has convinced me.
Maybe it is selective presentation of facts but Russia has hardly bothered to counter it.
If I would feel ever in doubt I can go to official Twitter account of Russian government and feel reassured about treating Russia as suspicious, problematic, dangerous and lying.
That's fair, but where for one people paranoid overreaction to their own history might still be arguably adaptive as a meta-reasoning, it seems like insanity for others to go along with it.
Given high cost of failure* and relatively small costs of reducing risks it seems to be not a paranoid overreaction to me. But well, if I would be overly paranoid then I would claim this.
Bombing Moscow under "well, they will attack anyway so we can start" would be.
*underpreparation to WW II resulted in about 16% of population murdered, multiple years of murderous occupation and decades of colonial rule. And massive devastation of economy and several other major problems. Previous such failure resulted in 123 years of occupation and required world war to undo. Even with 1% risk of things going even a bit as badly as that - spending a bit more on defence seems a good idea.
It is not paranoia if they actually after you.
(to be clear, I am not expecting Russia to run death camps, but Mariupol-style devastation is bad enough)
Mea culpa for assuming it is more.
It is such fuckup that overestimating how specific part of fuck up is going is hardly a major failure.
Now there is talk that Poland is or might become the strongest land army in Europe
This would require either absurd overstretching of Polish resources or some comical failure across Europe including Russia. Several years of grinding down USSR reserves maybe could achieve this, but that seems quite unlikely scenario. Though Russia running out of tanks while invading half-failed state next door would still not be the stupidest part of this war.
Poland does not need larger army than Russia has, it needs to have large enough to fulfil it share of ensuring that invading NATO will remain scary enough. Or alternatively, powerful enough that invading Poland will be clearly stupid idea.
Also, ideally it would be small enough that no politician will get some ideas of invading neighbours (no trace of such ideas right now, but I would not underestimate stupidity of politicians).
epohon
29d ago
So the term which is common in political discussions is his invention. Two good things about him, then. Hitler invented autobahns or something.
Gaashk
29d ago
The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion.
What was their test like?
It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching. Or that a bank employee should be able to do whatever kind of math they might use for their job.
It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum. I vaguely remember having to pass an algebra test as an adult, some years after taking the course, in order to continue teaching a subject that involved no algebra at all, but a lot of enforcement of social norms and some design stuff. It seemed a little silly, and I do think I would have been pretty pissed if I had failed and needed to both re-learn algebra and pay a fee to re-take the test.
2rafa
29d ago
Yeah, after Facebook was almost broken up by regulators after he was personally blamed for Trump’s victory in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Hard not to see that as an obvious attempt to get the left off his back and avoid what has now happened to Musk.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
29d ago
I'm saying that it will grow monumentally in 2100 compared to 2000... And no, I'm not at the top even if I'm in a position to be a lazy layabout with internet and hookers, and if you're posting here, I assume neither are you. How many banks do you own?
You said that the overwhelming majority of humans in 2100 will be far less well off than those at the top.
We are talking about the world here, and not just the US, right?
My income is well within the global 1%, and the median American's income is within the top 3% globally.
I know you will want to salami slice even further, and talk about the global 0.1% or 0.00001%, but there's no reasonable metric by which the man in the mirror is not globally on top, despite ressentiment to people who have it even better.
the absolute value of available energy and freedoms for a common person will be considerably lower in 2100 than 2000.
I'm aware that this is the other part of your prediction, and I again can only say that the cabal needs to pick up the pace because the bottom half of the world is way better off than in 2000 and it's a long way back.
Crowstep
29d ago
Well, we don't live in pods, nor do we eat bugs. I'm not sure how being able to walk to work counts as a 'cage' but whatever. Falsified, I guess?
But you haven't answered the key question. Who are these malicious actors? What evidence do you have for their exitence or motives?
Ex_Nihilo
29d ago
Two questions about American colleges:
-
What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason? As someone in the arts, the committed development of new/avant-garde professional work comes to mind.
-
Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other? University dating policies have become vastly more restrictive/protective (based on your value system) in the last decade, especially those between the paying customers and the staff serving them. Is it simply a question of the power dynamic? Age of consent? Moral integrity?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent.
Sure, partially. But it's not entirely wrong. The idea didn't just come from nowhere.
I feel like I've seen an overcorrection in recent years away from the smart = socially awkward myth and towards a new myth of a pure linear spectrum between blonde-haired-seven-foot ubermensch math PhD star athletes on the one hand and sickly frail developmentally deficient chronic failures on the other, which is also not an accurate model of reality.
I'm intelligent and I was bullied pretty severely in middle school, up to and including physical assault. Things got better by high school and I had multiple friends and a decently normal social life, but I was never fantastically popular.
the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports
Not sure how we're defining "good at sports" but this point in particular doesn't match my experience at all. The stars on the high school football and basketball teams tended to be C students. Professional athletes in most major sports don't strike me as particularly more intelligent than average, at least compared to people who directly make a living off of cognitive skills.
In general the biographies of great thinkers show enough of what today we might label "sperg" behavior to make me think there's a legitimate pattern here - Newton, Kant, Wittgenstein...
practical_romantic
29d ago
ok so is it safe to do chin ups daily? would you recommend I switch my grip or not?
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
29d ago
I don't think your grip really matters, just use whichever feels comfortable and what you can get a good mind muscle connection with.
Just about any exercise is safe to do daily.
epohon
29d ago
Why is it consistently missed that this is my prediction for the future? Yes, we don't. We will. Unless we die, or I'm wrong.
epohon
29d ago
If you're talking about income, you're not at the top definitionally. How many banks do you own?
Crowstep
29d ago
I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents
Looks like the present tense to me. I assume that you're retreating from your original claim then? Unless you're willing to be even a tiny bit specific about who you're talking about I can't see how it is possible to have a meaningful discussion.
Ordinary humans already have far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms in 2024 than in 2000? You and I have very different definitions of far less. We are not living in pods, eating bugs, and owning nothing yet.
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