ABigGuy4U
12hr ago
The singularity hinges on the implicit assumption that there is some level of intelligence where you can think your way out of the laws of physics and thermodynamics.
ABigGuy4U
12hr ago
Sometimes I forget how much of a different information world that I seem to live in than a large part of this forum.
Most of the Motte (and the internet as a whole) are so divorced from any extractive industry that they’re like the kid from Deadwood: “Peaches come from a can. A man in a factory put them there”
ABigGuy4U
13hr ago
Fracking isn’t actually that cost effective. It gets massive subsidies because no one wants OPEC to have the world by the short-hairs. And then OPEC in turn sees fracking and starts dumping their own prices to try and drive it out of business. And then no one wants OPEC to have them by the short hairs, so they subsidize fracking even more.
ABigGuy4U
13hr ago
The Democrats on Israel are a lot like the Republicans on Israel: there is considerable anti-Israel sentiment in the younger parts of the base, but almost none of that actually filters up to the politicians in office. So you have your token three congressmen who criticize Israel, and all the others move in lockstep support, quietly or loudly. There’s a huge generation split, so boomers and Gen X of both left and right are much more likely to be pro-Israel, or at least moderate in their criticism.
ABigGuy4U
13hr ago
My suspicion is that there are military and intelligence systems without these hang ups.
ABigGuy4U
13hr ago
Good lord. Maybe that’s how they got caught, that would be detected by satellite. How long was this before the subway attack?
ABigGuy4U
15hr ago
I also suspect AQ might have remained an unreliable but still associated CIA proxy even as they started escalating attacks against US forces and installations overseas. So I think there may have been some covering up of the fact that CIA personnel were communicating with and possibly providing aid to AQ potentially right up until the attack. They might have even been rooked into unwittingly providing some material aid for the attack itself. This could also explain some of the intelligence failure, since CIA might have been convinced that AQ were mostly-controllable good boys (even if they occasionally got rowdy) and not likely to do something that drastic against the mainland US.
Unlike a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, I’m not particularly wedded to a single theory and I have contemplated a lot of different narratives.
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Smoking is genuinely really bad for you, but was used as scapegoat for cancers caused by numerous industrial chemicals. Cancer rates have not reduced as much as they should have given the massive decline in smoking.
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President Garfield’s assassination was part of a conspiracy to ram through significant changes to the structure of the federal government that allowed for the formation of an entrenched deep state
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Due to widespread corruption in the New York Construction industry in the 1970s, the twin towers were not nearly as fire-resistant in reality as they were on paper.
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Bill Gates and other big tech entrepreneurs are simply front guys for the CIA, which actually founded their companies.
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DARPA and intelligence agencies have had access to AI since the late 1980s or early 1990s. The public internet was created to allow for the formation of massive training data sets for more advanced models.
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Tactical nuclear weapons have been used in various conflicts, and the various nations with detection capability have decided not to publicize this.
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The woke mania and economic decline of the United States is an intentional Boys from Brazil style attempt to recreate the social and economic conditions of Weimar Germany in order to provoke a future fascist backlash.
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The Apollo program was scotched because a sharp increase in solar weather activity starting in early 1973 made it too dangerous. In particular there was a large solar flare about two weeks after the Apollo 17 mission that scientists calculated would have killed the crew had it happened during the mission. This I actually have some confirmation for. That’s why you could go to the moon in a tin can in 1968 but now Elon Musk and NASA are now constantly talking about why there has to be multiple-foot thick shielding for any manned mission outside low earth orbit.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Also recently it he come out that the algorithms used by hiring websites were effectively black-listing millions of applicants from getting hired by anyone. Which could explain some of the horror stories about putting out 600 applications and not getting a callback from anyone.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
It should be possible to do a scene with a puppet or very rough cgi and just have AI replace it with a realistic cat.
WTF?! How did they get the cat to do that??
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
It’s ok, the brief depiction of the attack is pretty accurate, but the majority of the movie which is about the assassination campaign afterward is heavily fictionalized. Also it’s a bit overly sentimental for my taste, I don’t think Spielberg was the best fit for the material even if he was the one who got it made.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
In the last century there were fairly high paying manufacturing jobs that could give you a middle class lifestyle. So in the United States from about WWII to 2008, you could be middle class if you worked hard. The route gradually changed but the rule mostly held.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
If some ancient soviet program to promote teaching precisely the wrong way took on a life of it's own in academia.
It’s a Prussian conspiracy. The vile Hun could not beat America on the battlefield in any of their three attempts (1776, 1918, 1945) so they turned their autistic minds to devious conspiracy.
Has any neutral third party actually confirmed who committed the Bucha massacre?
Not that I’m aware of. I don’t even know who would count as neutral at this point. It’s very odd, since both Russia and Ukraine seem to have been pretty well behaved since.
which made me adjust many of my priors about the competence of the Russian military.
Russia always starts incompetent. Then at some point it turns around. I suspect they’ll end up getting more, because decision paralysis will keep Ukraine fighting until their army completely falls apart. It’s like how imperial Germany lost WWI: Gradually, then suddenly.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Like the Bucha massacre, which they spent the next three years trying to blame on the Russians. This was potentially a problem in 2022, but now even a pretty solid Ukrainian win at the negotiating table probably wouldn’t include Donbas.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
No alleged legality issues like with the infamous Muslim Ban?
This basically is the renewed Muslim ban, with a few additional countries thrown in to keep the Supreme Court off his back. Which is how he ended up doing it the last time too, after a few tries.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
That’s the real ploy. Everyone is missing the forest for the trees, quibbling over the legality of the drone strikes, when they are being prepped for Iraq 2.0. Venezuela is like in the D minus list for drug smuggling, if it was really about drugs they would be talking about Mexico.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals
Yeah it’s not like the Reagan administration had a school in Georgia where they taught Latin American right wing death squads how to torture and murder people. Oh wait they did. Latin America is already well aware that America has no baseline rules of conduct. This boat stuff is absolutely tame by the standards of the 1980s.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Dumped his wife for his cousin. Professionally I think he was ok, if I recall correctly.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
The funniest outcome here is that Texas creates a whole pile of slightly-pink districts to try to stretch the Republican butter over as much toast as possible, and a truly bad midterm causes Texas to elect more Democrats than they thought they would.
That’s one of the classic dangers of Gerrymandering, it can turn a small landslide in the wrong direction into an absolute blowout.
The thing to remember about Slavs is that they were (as the name would imply) slaves. They were in the borderland between the mongols, the muslims, the Germanics, and the Vikings, and constantly getting rolled and subjugated by all four. As you can see from other ethnic groups that were slaves for generations, it does not make you high trust. It makes you servile in the face of brutality, cruel when you have power, distrustful, melancholic, and constantly scheming for any advantage.
Ok look, he was kissing the ground as he came ashore. He did NOT trip and eat shit on the beach in an inauspicious sign that his hubris was disfavored by the gods. The very fact that that you are insinuating this makes me think that you are a butthurt Gallic shill poster working out of a boiler room in some mud hut in Lugdunum. Opinion disregarded.
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