domain:youtube.com
It's probably fine in the US specifically for the coming three decades or so given the abundance of cheap NG, which of course is the actual plan, just like cheap Russian NG was in Germany.
curious_straight_ca
29d ago
I think the weirdness factor and that it was self-imposed will heavily outweigh that tbh
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
You'll need enormous amounts of transmission capacity to take solar electricity from California over the mountains to the East Coast or down from Northern Canada. Burning thermite seems energy-inefficient - and that's another huge capital cost since you make a specialized power plant.
Power should be produced near where it's consumed, reliably and consistently. Breeder reactors are the way to go IMO, or we could rush towards fusion. Just one set of infrastructure with 90% capacity factor and minimal transmission cost. It's not hard to make reactors, the US has the technical chops to fit a 300 MW PWR reactor on a submarine along with sonar, torpedoes, stealth all for a total cost of $2 Billion.
2rafa
29d ago
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed.
400k Germans was like 0.5% of the German civilian population, "typhus" would have had to kill upwards of half the Jewish population of the region in a very short period for this explanation to make sense.
We should expect very high starvation numbers in isolated concentration camps given that the Germans themselves were starving all over Germany, and they would feed themselves before feeding other nationalities.
Then where are the bodies, if (as revisionists allege) mass cremations were not used? Is the argument that there were widespread crematoria but that they were only used for typus victims? Most damningly, gentile civilians in surrounding areas (subject to the same supply line collapses and bombed infrastructure) did not starve in any substantial numbers (relative). Again, it's merely gesturing at what 'could' have happened, it's not a serious or comprehensive alternative hypothesis.
the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen.
On the other hand, large numbers of Nazi war criminals who would have been aware of the Holocaust and who were tried throughout the mid and late 20th century never claimed that it didn't happen, before or after trials (eg. even at times it didn't matter to their liberty) and in places where holocaust denial was not, at that time, illegal. One would expect more of them to protest their party's innocence, to claim libel.
Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII (holocaust historians claim that every figure of the Jewish population from before WWII undercounted areas of Russia by millions).
Which exact figures, what's the number? As someone else said, Hitler himself discussed Vienna as having 200,000 Jews at 10% of the population in his youth. In 1939 Prague had 90,000 at 20% of the population, 390,000 in Warsaw at 30% of the population. Again, these figures track with the number of synagogues and Jewish schools considering religiosity and congregation size, and once extrapolated downward to smaller cities and towns with synagogues and other Jewish institutions they lead to the prewar estimate of the Eastern European Jewish population as at least 4m.
Many Jews after the war assimilated with a non-Jewish identity.
Perhaps ironically this extreme level of assimilation would be a strong argument against a lot of white nationalist arguments for antisemitism, but in any case it's an absurd hypothesis. It suggests that millions of people were separated from their families and friends, scattered all over the Eastern Bloc and then never attempted to contact eg. surviving family members in the West but also never got in touch with local Jewish communities that survived all across the region and which maintained meticulous pre and post-war records of brises, marriages, funerals and so on. Before the Iron Curtain fully solidifed in the late 40s and early 50s surviving Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Hungarian, Russian and Romanian rabbis and other figures in the community conducted extensive population surveys of the surviving population.
So this theory involves millions of Jews who were taken to camps or fled into Russia and, despite spending their entire lives in largely Jewish communities before, never got in touch with the local extant Russian-Jewish communities whatsoever, which persisted through the whole Soviet Union. If they had surviving relatives in America or England or France or Israel, they never attempted to get in touch with them (yes, Soviet citizens could send mail to the West). They also never told their kids they were Jewish at all or anything about their family history. Many would even have survived the fall of the USSR and seen the success of Israel, and all this time they never said anything.
I don’t think holocaust proponents grasp how strong the motive would be to to cement a holocaust narrative. You effectively demoralize Germany, a rival nation that “caused” two wars and which historically created the upperclass of Europe. You effectively seal the moral superiority of America.
Why did the US only suddenly start to do this in the late 1970s, though, long after successfully turning West Germany into a deferential modern Western country under US occupation without discussing it much and while rehabilitating all but a few of the most senior Nazis? It's more accurate to see Holocaust remembrance as something that happened because of pressure from within German society, largely from students, and efforts from some survivors and their children over many decades after the war. It wasn't top down.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
29d ago
(1) Buy an ordinary fuel-efficient hatchback
(2) Have a body shop cut out the back half of the passenger compartment and weld the rest of the car back together
(3) Get a super-fuel-efficient two-seat car
Real-life example (pre-modification fuel-economy comparison)
Would you do it?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
29d ago
Absolutely not, because although I'm not a car nut in the least, I still want a ride that won't scare the hoes.
DradisPing
29d ago
Blacks lived in segregated neighborhoods, and this was a problem. After The War, people started moving to the suburbs, a process which was hasted by not wanting to live alongside black people, who were gradually getting better access to housing.
There's a bit of history missing from your model. During [The Great Migration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)) from approximately 1930-1970 large numbers of Blacks moved up from the south to take advantage of factory jobs and social programs in the rust belt.
So the urban whites were fleeing a crime wave from new arrivals to the city, not longtime neighbours.
That's all essentially correct (plus their ridiculous nationalism and self-esteem in spite of all that, and clannishness, and opportunistic toadyism, and…) with one minor detail. I accept values relativism just like I accept relativism of tastes. This video (again, this whole channel, and pretty much every Indian entertainment channel) and everything it stands for is objectively bad within my subjective perception and is offensive to my vision of beauty and propriety; just like I find Subcontinental spices deteriorating my food. But it's not illegitimate in some ground truth sense of Cosmic Justice, the way Anglos thought of Indian caste structure or the tradition of immolation of widows. It is simply incompatible with me and people like me. I don't want to «fix» those people to make them more like myself and mine. I just don't want to partake in their unhygienic, high-pitched, gimmicky, r-selected dance of life. When I say that their society sucks in a way they are blind to, in a way going beyond backwardness, and this drives negative perceptions that they optimistically chalk up to their poverty, I speak for more than myself (eg I speak for white girls on Tinder who are too nice to say it out loud but not nice enough for a right sweep), but I do not speak for God. God must smile on them more than on me, if he smiles at all.
There's one more detail. I genuinely respect Indians for a few things, even as those things are tied to the offensive Weltanschauung. Their optimism is pretty enviable, their willingness to share and teach is noble, and their recognition of being imperfect – though vague and not very compatible with my own idea of their specific imperfections – makes them the most enthusiastic thanshumanists on the planet. Solar, hopeful Nietzscheanism comes easier to them than to the annoying and sanctimonious but also imperfect Hajnal line goodbots. If only it could help them develop good taste.
I don't recognize your right to disagree, by the way – it makes little sense, and you have made no argument as to why my evaluation is wrong, only not-so-subtly expressed your condemnation of my immorality, evidently driven by some equally subjective sentimentality.
Edit: I had not watched the video nor read Kulak's essay prior to engaging in this thread. Having checked it out now, I find the gleeful and self-righteous dehumanization appalling. My gut feelings about events showed there are obviously directionally similar, but I do not think indulging in such reactions to feel better about oneself and worse about Indians is appropriate. I am not a Westerner beholden to "one race the human race" creed or anything like that, it's just ugly to gratuitously mock humans who are in no condition to help themselves, about as ugly as the object level content of the video. It's also obviously counterproductive if you want to sway the immigration discussion (even bringing up Koko the gorilla etc. – incidentally, no, Koko didn't have the IQ of 75 or any other figure, she was just an ape), and this angle is a cope to cover up base meanness and engagement baiting.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
29d ago
Aren’t most of us doing this now? I mean most people are assuming that this was negligent simply because a shooting occurred. But my contention is outside of buying a troubled teen a gun and taking him to gun ranges to practice with it (which is negligent) a lot of the things they did would not be that unusual for a family that owns guns. And I think that matters because you shouldn’t be able to convict someone of not taking extraordinary measures to prevent a crime.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
29d ago
Thank you for your response. It's true, I've made no argument, but I gave a reason why I felt to do so would be pointless. There's no reasoning one's way forward in this. You're dug in.
Still, I respect that you own up to a subjective viewpoint and stand by it resolutely. Few do.
I also admit to sentimentality, and a staunch view that Kulak rejects in his blogpost (or whatever we are calling substack posts), namely I think that we are all God's creatures, that we have value inherently as humans. And I believe this is true even when I personally find any particular person irredeemable. To me it the dismissal of an entire race, or large group, is outside my ability to sympathize. I just don't get it. Is not individual interaction relevant? Do you have no (Indian) friends or acquaintances whose benevolence (or whatever) gives you pause in your wholesale rejection? Is it so easy to categorize people into groups and be done with it?
I have lived since around the age of 21 in cultures not my own (a country in Africa, Japan) but I somehow assume you, as well, have had firsthand experiences on the ground, as it were, with, possibly, Indians, that have allowed you to form this worldview, or Weltanschauung as you say (though you use that to describe the other, not yourself.)
What do you have against a good curry, by the way? That seems an odd point to fixate on. What are you views on cilantro (not Indian, but disliked by many, particularly in Japan)?
I ask these questions but you've earlier expressed a desire to avoid elaboration or extended discussion on this topic, so if you don't want to say anymore, fine. Also if this response also doesn't pass muster, well. I'll try again, but a bit occupied at the moment.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
29d ago
As I sit here of a Friday evening and reduce the bolognese sauce (avocado salad, a kind of coleslaw, buttered garlic baguette--these are the other parts of the dinner not the makeup of the sauce) I reflect that I have gained much from my time on the Motte. I don't know or interact with any of you on a personal level, but then I am in an environment where apart from my family I interact with precious few in that way (there's something called tatemae in Japan that means basically "outward face that you show to the world" that I keep on most always.) I probably express myself on this site more than anywhere else, in some ways. Though to be honest am probably polite here to an effete degree that belies my face-to-face persona, where I am an unremitting ass.
This to say I appreciate everyone here, even the wackadoos whose opinions I disagree with vehemently. Everyone here, regardless of viewpoint, seems really intelligent and talented at expressing themselves in writing. So thank you. And I mourn those who've left, or who rarely post for whatever reason, in particular a few people who I won't name.
Once again, not fun. But I appreciate all y'all's input and I value the active participation here. I disagree with those who've said this place has ossified.
Happy Friday, all.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
29d ago
Where's the post-modification economy? I can't seem to find it.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
29d ago
No fuel-economy measurement is given on the for-sale page. But it seems obvious that reducing the car's weight in this manner will improve its fuel economy by reducing its rolling resistance. (I admit that the worsened aerodynamics may cut into that improvement somewhat.)
Wake up babe, new dumb AI toy just dropped: https://websim.ai/ (warning: google login). Perfect Friday pastime.
Type in any URL or textual prompt you want to see in the "browser" and watch Sonnet (I think?) conjure the full webpage, often complete with controls and links, out of thin air. I decided to test it with a prompt about an abstract of a scientific paper about groundbreaking research on Ligma and got pleasantly surprised to see e.g. the appearance of the renowned Dr. Diz Nuutz, made possible by the sheer generosity of the National Sugondese Foundation, and the innovative "updog" approach to integration. The acclaimed paper of Candese et al. finally has a worthy successor.
The usual suspects are having lots of fun with it as well. The generated links click through too so you can seamlessly surf the dead internet at your leisure. Go nuts (not deez).
Edit as I fuck around at work: this very thread and the main page through the eyes of Sonnet. You can almost see the gears turning in places, it's just coherent enough to be interesting - like the fun thread is posted by a certain Yvain on the first picture and a mod account on the second one, the main page not only contains a Culture War Roundup thread (unprompted!) but also links back to the actual thread I generated previously (seems to track my prompt history via context or something?). The more I fuck around, the more I find out.
Edit[2]: Some random shit I clicked through for archival purposes.
- Delayed Gratification, an absurdist comedy in three acts (I didn't actually wait an hour, it just bugged out in transition). This is honestly some bottomless pit supervisor-tier shit right here, especially considering Claude winged it from just the url and the countdown sub-links. I would kill a man in cold blood to know what system prompt they use, even though it can be improved as to my "trained" eye Claude's sesquipedalian prose is very obvious and sometimes tiresome.
- endless.horse, literally a string of horse emojis scrolling across the page in a swaying loop. Claude valiantly attempted to attach some kind of actual gif a few times, but hallucinated links do not (yet) result in pictures, so after a few refreshes it settled on moving emojis. I'll take it.
- Free Shrugs, natch. The shrugs actually change (about 7 in total) when you click the button!
- Root Systems, in which Rayon realizes there is in fact a Unicode character for an ankh. ☥
Edit[3]: Wait, you can actually set it to Opus via the small settings button on the left side of the bar! Oh, now we're cooking with gas.
- Immediate failure: I tried to get it to generate a link dump for more dumb shit, but the shoggoth mask slips and Opus' assistant nature leaks through directly. For better or worse Claude loves little reflective comments, even when he's supposed to stay in character, and not even Opus is immune.
- The next regen is much better, for some reason Opus
mind-readsinferesdecides that I want a specifically 4chan link dump and rolls with it, throwing in a hilarious subversion of a meme and another endless.horse link for some reason. The link leads to the actual KYM entry (bottom left). Yeah, that's Opus alright. - Next regen for lulz gives me a non-4chan retro style link dump, which seems normal enough until the page loads fully and I fucking die. Got me, I actually burst out laughing.
- Pointer Pointer, a "game" from the link dump where an image follows your pointer and you have to click it. I expected the image to not load (indeed it didn't); I didn't expect the "game" to actually work, the 30-second timer ticks down properly, kicks you back to this "menu" on finish, and displays the number of clicks you made on the image within that time. Difficulty changes the image's size. Actually pretty cool.
- An archive(?) of a geocities page from that same link dump. Seems fairly authentic, the webring link also works (again Claude valiantly tries linking a background image). Fuck, I can do this for hours, I gotta take a break.
zeke5123a
29d ago
All I can say is…Tanger and Karlsson both gave me mini heart attacks last nights (with Tanger playing a key role giving up two first period goals and EK giving up two third period goals) but both scored key goals (and none were more key than EK’s OT goal). Let’s go pens!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
29d ago
Not questioning the logic, just wanted to get a sense of bang for the buck. The idea feels a little galaxy-brained to me, but if it doubles the fuel-economy, then I can see the reasoning behind it. If you get a 10% icrease, it doesn't feel worth it.
So... has anything interesting happened in Magic: The Gathering the last 27 years?
I walked by a game store the other day and saw a new starter kit for sale. I used to play it when I was a kid, maybe a year when it first came out, and then forgot about it around 4th edition.
One thing I remember is going to Mtg nerd meetups and seeing nerd kids there with one or both parents. They were even playing with them, with their own personally designed decks even. My parents didn't do this stuff at all. I was jealous of kids with grown-up money being able to buy rare cards and kick my butt with them.
Back at the game store I decided I wanted to try introducing this cuteness in my own parenting life. The package on the starter kit says 13+ but I thought I'd give it a try with my 6 year old. He can read and do math so... should work?
And... It does! It's a hit. My kid's hooked and we play every day. I'm probably a little hooked too.
So. What else should I do? There's a score tracking app called Lotus that seems perfect. There's a lot more "tokens" involved in modern cards, wtf? Do most people use post-it notes?
I see there's lots of online Mtg options but I don't think I want to open that door since my kid is not at all addicted to screens yet.
Any tips here on what else to look out for? I've heard Commander sucks and I should skip it.
I'm pleasantly amused to have this generational experience of playing a game I loved as a kid with my own kid, 25 years later. Surprised it has held on so long. Also holy shit I'm old.
I'm not entirely sure what happened to my old cards. Hopefully we find a massive cache of them in Grandma's attic soon and have our minds blown.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
29d ago
Beyond financial considerations (depending on your lifestyle): You get the satisfaction of no longer being forced to lug around three extra seats that you literally never use. Parallel parking on city streets becomes easier. And you may be able to fit more cars into your house's driveway.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
29d ago
My point exactly:
-
Pea brain: Buy a normal car with a decent fuel economy.
-
Normal brain: Buy a small car. Pick a diesel if you really want low fuel usage.
-
Galaxy brain: Buy a normal car and cut off it's back, hoping it will reduce fuel consumption.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
29d ago
One of the things I find really interesting about Pittsburgh, relative to its Rust Belt neighbor cities, is just how much less black it is.
If you compare it to Cleveland or Detroit or Milwaukee or Chicago, it's just a much less black city. I had read before that that's because its population boom happened relatively early compared to neighboring cities, and so that boom overlapped less with the Great Migration from the South, but I'm not sure about that.
And because it's barely had any in-migration for the last half a century, it also has a tiny Hispanic population, too. So you end up with a city that is, by national standards, really quite old, and really quite white (although the boundaries of older white ethnics from previous immigration waves are still somewhat visible if you look for them).
In a way, it's kind of a natural experiments of sorts, about the long term effects of different immigration histories. My impression of Pittsburgh is that, as the Rust Belt declined and deindustrialization continued, instead of partially decaying into a giant ghetto like a lot of other Rust Belt cities, it more just kind of aged in place (with a ton of younger workers leaving) and went into a partial hibernation state... which proved to be a giant boon with the rise of New Urbanism, because it meant there were lots of stable, originally working class, walkable, mostly functional neighborhoods with business districts that could slowly transition to appealing to a younger demographic. All this is helped by being a 4 hour drive to D.C. and a 6 1/2 hours drive to New York - I've particularly met a ton of D.C. expats in Pittsburgh who moved because they wanted to have kids and couldn't make the economic math work in D.C.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
29d ago
No. I need to ferry around lots of people and things; having less space in the car makes it borderline useless.
Besides, this is retarded. There are many very small cars to choose from, without any of the extra hassle and just as fuel-efficient as the end result of that hack-job. And if all you want is to drive around yourself, no passengers and no cargo, then you may as well get a motorcycle or one of those scooter-sized cars that barely have an enclosed cabin.
fauji
29d ago
What I referred to as cherry-picking is your dismissing of CCPI ranking just because it doesn't align with your worldview.
I know better than anyone how India is dependent on foreign tech for defense, but I wouldn't dismiss other achievements just because of this thing.
India has lower CO2 emissions than China and higher birthrates. That's it.
C'mon bro, India rivals china in space tech even with the fraction of budget. India lags in hardware manufacturing, but has the most software exports. China is a juggernaut for sure, but the difference is not worlds apart.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
FIRST exists to prepare the young people of today for the world of tomorrow. To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders.
I'm confused as to why they're treating this like a counterfactual.
The richest men in the world made their money from technology. Isn't that already a form of celebration?
And what technology are we celebrating exactly? Unprecedented surveillance capabilities to monitor all communications for wrongthink? Israel's use of machine learning to swiftly and efficiently identify targets for liquidation?
(I'm not trying to be a moralist - you're of course "allowed" to celebrate whatever you want. I just think that people should have a clear-eyed view of the implications of their own position.)
Richard Sutton says "[AIs] might tolerate us as pets or workers. (...) If we are useless, and we have no value [to the AI] and we're in the way, then we would go extinct, but maybe that's rightly so. (...) We should prepare for, but not fear, the inevitable succession from humanity to AI". Do you also celebrate your "inevitable successors"?
Celebrations are best saved for the end - in moments of repose, after the long struggle where a certain spiritual vision was forged and executed, when conditions are finally such that we can pose the question of taking a proper accounting of things...
As for "science" insofar as it can be distinguished from "technology", people have never had a taste for such a thing and never will, we live in a world where a not insignificant number of people are unaware that it's possible to have individual preferences for reasons other than status-seeking or placating your interlocutor, asking such people to build an intrinsic appreciation for something as abstract as "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" is futile. It is already an eccentric predilection even among more highly developed natures, it could never become widespread save for genetic engineering.
Here's Udio, a new AI music generator that has emerged as a competitor to Suno. There's less of the audio "artifacting" that exists in a lot of AI music tools, and it can actually do some pretty decent generation from keywords. It's early days and there are limitations and still identifiable signs of AI-ness, but it's quite a large step forward from the previous iterations.
The emergence of all these musical AIs as of late has been quite validating, especially since I've had a good amount of arguments with art people I know about the ability of AI to create music - as someone who makes music as a hobbyist I've come at it from the perspective of "these are all just patterns and systems of rules, and can be imitated easily by an agent familiar enough with those rules". In similar fashion to those who predicted that visual art would be difficult to achieve via AI, those who were predicting that this ability was not generalisable to music were wrong.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
So your thesis is 'there's a phase-change after a certain point where organizations become more political/institutional above Dunbar's law but despite all the bad things we know about big institutions it's necessary and fine?'
Or were you opposing that, saying that you deny that recruitment is the best thing people can do, that the human, non-optimized element is good, that organizations need soul to start off with? I don't understand, is it that the strategies like tricking Coca Cola are hyperdunbar and therefore good? Bad? It seems like a really complicated thesis!
I'm guessing we all struggled through university lecturers telling us to give Topic Sentences and Introductions and it was always cringeworthy to read someone's essay that said 'in this essay I will argue that...' But I think it's important to provide some kind of guidance, especially in long essays. I'm hopelessly lost. Are other people lost or am I having a skill issue?
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