RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
Imagine The Motte in 1904, before the Battle of Tsushima, and the confident essays about how East Asians “just don’t have civilizational war in them.”
But the East Asians were clearly pretty good at war even before 1904? Attila the Hun and the Mongols both managed to beat Europeans in their day. Notably China also developed the compass and gunpowder weapons. China was a big source of porcelain, silk and other manufactured goods.
If one side got centuries of relatively (I acknowledge "relative" is a load-bearing word) unmolested compounding (trade routes, gunpowder iteration, fiscal states, etc.) and the other got geographical isolation, depopulation, extraction, arms restrictions, and arbitrary boundary-drawing
OK and what's the root cause of that compounding then? Sub-saharan Africa had plenty of gold, ivory, arable land, they certainly had things that people wanted. But they consistently failed to produce powerful states and institutions (you need to be highly organized and orderly for that), they failed to take control of trade routes (you need advanced financial abilities, strong laws, shipbuilding and seamanship), they failed to develop advanced metallurgy/textiles for industry and weapons (you need to be smart for this). Even today, the sub-Saharan African countries still can't make any advanced technology domestically, only apartheid South Africa could make their own jet fighters, nuclear weapons or pioneer heart transplants.
They had a shield of disease that prevented more capable foreigners from conquering them, that's how they retained independence (and how they expanded to the Caribbean tbh). But the moment that quinine pierced the shield, the Scramble for Africa.
Meanwhile Poland got carved up, plundered, colonized, genocided, communismed for a few centuries and they're now highly developed, producing infrared photonics, AAA video games, high-precision plasma generators. The Ottomans were slave-raiding, plundering, raping Eastern Europe for centuries. Eastern Europe is now highly developed. They make tanks, steel, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles... China got wrecked for a century, then hit with a particularly bad strain of communism but they're a superpower today.
Historical compounding and catch-up growth is a consequence of innate ability. Yes, there are historical and geographical factors that matter. But they matter less than innate ability. Even under Maoism, China was a major world power that could fight the US to a draw in Korea, develop ICBMs and H-bombs. Innate ability is the key. That's the best way to explain this trend.
If this scenario happened in Europe — say, between Russia and Georgia — we don’t suddenly say “there must be something deficient about Georgian ancestry.”
This scenario didn't happen in Europe. The Russians (a full army and air force) went in on Georgia and walloped them, imposing a limited defeat. It was not a small band of adventurers like Wagner that took over a whole country and exploited their natural resources.
But notice what happens rhetorically: when Africans win at long odds against a European power, it gets filed under “numbers and technology, nothing to see here.”
The strongest African powers occasionally hold off the weakest European powers but almost always lose. That's the key trend. Numbers and technology are of course very important. Mobilizing that is the whole aim of the game. Any win is still a win. But it's a very different kind of win to Russia fighting a very strong European power's full offensive power (making their own weapons) and marching their troops into Paris! The Russians did not merely fend off the French, they all but conquered France. The Ethiopians never conquered Italy.
What I mean by political vs military victory is kind of the difference between Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh city and New York becoming Vo Nguyen Giap City. That's a wholly different kind of victory, a total success at arms when all political resources were fully committed to the struggle. Some black countries achieved the former, never the latter.
You’d also need to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”.
Well if we introduced Africans to a very high human-capital civilization like America we'd assume the institutions would rub off on them right, they'd suddenly realize (like the East Asians did) how to do things effectively? Right? There'd be no chronic dysfunction, massively high crime rate, no poverty issues, no massive crime rate? They'd start getting STEM Nobels?
Or a US-supported black colony in Africa, with a constitution directly copied from America, shielded from any external threat by US power, that'd do well right?
Or all these black refugees/economic migrants heading to Europe, they'd be doctors and lawyers, not rapey welfare-abusers right?
But no, Liberia is a shithole, it's just the same as other West African countries. US blacks are violent, unproductive money-sinks. Europe is getting very sick of these refugees. I don't understand why centuries of poverty and brutal oppression immediately washes off Poles, Irish, Russians, Chinese, Koreans and they can immediately go out and do great things once free but blacks are somehow uniquely vulnerable to slavery and mistreatment that they'd be permanently degraded by this (in Ethiopia's case it was only a few years of Italian rule). The simplest scenario is that they're innately less capable.
It is dangerous to believe that there is some inherent, innate strength by being of some particular race, biological marking when the relationship is so tenuous. That's all the steps needed before arrogance, and then ignorance, and ultimately, defeat.
I think it's much more dangerous to think that one's strength is in institutions or ideology rather than race. Racists like Stoddard (he wrote 'the rising tide of color') were extremely farsighted in predicting the power of China by observing the ability of the Chinese people. Whereas institution/culture people still deny Chinese potential, recall all the cope about how 'communists can't innovate.' We don't hear that much any more.
It's only dangerous if I'm wrong. But the predictions of racists have been proven more accurate than the anti-racists. The integrationists of the 50s and 60s thought that US blacks would be performing as if they were white, the investment would've paid off by now. But it hasn't. This is the arrogance that has cost trillions in fruitless, unjust DEI, tens of thousands of raped or murdered whites who 'didn't want to be racist', whole books like 'White girl bleed a lot' or 'Don't make the black kids angry' which are nothing but compilations of the tragicomedic failure of the antiracist worldview and the endless media/education work that's needed to prop it up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
And if the only response to that reality is calling everyone an anti-semite or a nazi then what is even the point of this?
Well it worked pretty well, boomers have already had their opinions set by the television.
I read somewhere an argument about how stable systems were inherently unstable in a changing world. They set up the whole ADL/AIPAC/lobbying/media machine to suppress and drown out dissenters. It worked well. But it works by suppressing rather than adapting. Things change, people get increasingly upset about the anomaly of them funding bombs for Israel to blow up random Palestinians, while the usual suspects in the media are still talking about how Israel is the 'most moral army.' That works if you have total media dominance but not if the battlefield is somewhat contested, it backfires if there are videos of Israeli parliamentarians enthusiastically justifying torture, if they go around shooting unarmed protestors or people trying to get food. Trying to stick to the maximalist narrative just further delegitimizes that media power.
They keep mashing the 'suppress' button but the suppression isn't working. The system is designed to be stable, not to change. The goal and methods and mindset is fixed. There is some evidence of adaptation (Team Israel is working to try and manipulate the Tiktok algorithm and LLM training data for instance) but the system as a whole is breaking down.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I keep thinking that in instances like this it would be very instructive to arbitrarily equalize something that affects the deciding party, give them a taste of equality.
In Birmingham, some judges decided it was unfair that some female-dominated council jobs got paid less, had fewer perks than binmen. The council, now short of cash decided to lower the binmen's salary and perks in part to pay compensation to the women. This caused the binmen to go on strike, no waste to be collected, a strike which continues to this day (though agency workers are collecting waste, and are likely more expensive to boot).
I think the judges in question should have had their salaries reduced to those of the binmen. If this were done, they'd quickly uncover new and interesting legal theories about why different jobs have different pay and perks and how this may indeed be equitable. Probably this is very illegal, judges would surely find that it's against the Rule of Law to reduce the privileges of judges. But I don't think they'd quickly do such things again if it were done and the judicial bitching and whining were ignored, they have the latitude to interpret retarded laws more or less reasonably.
Officials, judges and councillors would not be so high-handed if there were more direct consequences for their actions. I know this does go against separation of powers but they're not really separated, when a government really wants something they can just do it, to hell with the law or anything in the way. Government just needs to be more aligned.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
I guess the argument is that it will make Windows easier to use for non-technical people.
I think this is just a straightforwardly good idea from a user-utility perspective. Doing anything remotely difficult on Windows requires navigating a maze of menus and bullshit. Anything to do with event viewer or powershell is a mess and LLMs can clean it up.
Many normal people have no idea what the CPU in their PC actually does, they're technically illiterate. They're not going to go on the Microsoft forum, post their problem in an intelligent way and get a useful response and then execute the solution. An agentic LLM at least has a chance of getting it right.
Meanwhile, it might actually make the experience worse for Grandma, who is gaslit into picking suboptimal settings for herself by an unhelpful machine.
Grandma doesn't have a clue. She doesn't know that the PC isn't supposed to have 80% of its memory eaten up by bloatware preinstalled by the manufacturer, whereas an AI might. Microsoft of course might just use the AI to extract more money from people or use it as an excuse to do more spying... Let's wait and see.
Copilot is just straightforwardly useful I find, yet everyone hates it for seemingly no reason.
This is mostly misleading, misleadingly framed or outright propaganda. Why, say, should the key takeaway from https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/three-four-russians-expect-military-victory-over-ukraine be that 7% more Russians want peace talks than last year? "As in past surveys, three in four support the continued military action in Ukraine" seems just as relevant?
'Meat assaults' aren't a real thing in this war. It's just a reheated trope from WW2 and was scarcely a thing there (besides banzai charges), it's just a pejorative way of describing a frontal assault. In an era of ubuiquitous ISR and long range strikes, it's very difficult for either side to concentrate a large force for a major offensive so they end up launching various small probing attacks, using infiltration tactics.
All your link says is that the EU has 'agreed' that frozen Russian assets should be sent to Ukraine. But they can't actually figure out a way to do this for fear of legal/reputational risks. Nations will understandably have some difficulty trusting the EU with their money if the EU can just take it and give it away as they please. It's just talk until they do it.
Your link saying North Korean shells have a failure rate of 50% comes directly from Ukrainian intelligence.
"But these munitions are from the 70s and 80s. Half of them do not function, and the rest require either restoration or inspection before use," the GUR official said, citing Ukraine's latest assessment.
As does this link: https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/north-korea-runs-out-of-shells-for-putin-1763159907.html
Ukrainian intelligence is not a reliable source on the war.
Russia drops bombs using their many planes daily, but Ukrainians sometimes deliver up to 300 drones and ballistic cruise missile strikes a day. Any refinery, power plant, supply dump even far away from the front can be hit.
There's a huge disparity between these strikes. The Russians have far more missile striking power, much bigger warheads on Iskander or Kinzhals than Ukraine has with their measly drones. That's why electricity and water distribution in Kiev has been heavily degraded whereas there have been no similar blackouts and load-shedding in Moscow, only in border areas like Belgorod that are in range of Ukraine's smaller, shorter-range missile arsenal.
What's actually happening in this war is that the bigger, stronger power is inflicting proportionately more damage on the smaller, weaker power. The side with more bombs, more shells, more guns, more drones, more men and more missiles has the advantage. That's why Russia has the initiative and is attacking, why Ukraine and Ukraine's allies have been shifting from their stance of 'pre-2014 borders' to demanding a 'ceasefire at the frontlines'.
That's why Russia is paying soldiers lavishly, whereas Ukraine is grabbing men off the street and shoving them in vans. This war is fought with vast disparity. Russia loses warships. Ukraine has no warships left to lose. Russia pays for soldiers, Ukraine drafts. Russia produces drones en masse, Ukraine has to ration with 'gamified' currency and score-based requisition for the best units. Russian allies fight on the frontlines, Ukrainian allies provide ambiguous promises and military aid while remilitarizing themselves, fearing some aggression. If Russia is faring so poorly against Ukraine, why is the EU so alarmed?
It's no good to just shine a spotlight on every Russian shortcoming, real or imagined, the situation needs to be considered in aggregate. The story has been the same over the whole war. The bigger, stronger power has more cards, more options, more ability to absorb damage and recover from reverses.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
We don't even need to know what genes are for race to be politically, economically and socially significant. The DEI people don't even think race has anything to do with genes, which is silly beyond a narrow word-games sense. Despite that, they can use race politically. No knowledge of genes is needed, only observation of outcomes and trends.
The ancients didn't need to know why arsenic was poisonous, only that it was. That's the key information.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
“Race” is a biologically fuzzy concept
Race being fuzzy doesn't mean DEI doesn't work. It doesn't prevent people worrying about the right representation of race in the military, in academia, in politics, in media, in jail. When I apply for a job, I am asked about my race. They don't do that for no reason. Indeed, HR will admit to discriminating against white men: https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-6-hiring-managers-have-been-told-to-stop-hiring-white-men/
Race is no more fuzzy than bullets are fuzzy. What is a bullet? Can it be made of copper, lead, ceramics? How about glass or wood? Can it be spherical or pointy or a dart-shaped flechette? Maybe it has explosives in it, maybe not. Huge diversity here!
But the key essence of a bullet is that you fire it out of a gun to hurt something. A really fine definition of bullet isn't needed to fire a gun. We don't need to nail down the exact nature of all the polygenic traits affecting a racial group to use it politically for X, Y or Z. Recognizing race is an extremely basic skill that children learn early on. Farmers made use of heredity in their animals centuries before anyone knew what genetics was.
There are no Black STEM Nobel winners, no Black Fields medallists, no impressive technical or civilizational achievements, much evidence of dysfunction wherever they go (the murdery parts of Detroit, the murdery parts of Washington DC, the murdery North of Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, South Africa, even Sudanese gangs in Melbourne). Yet there's a powerful lobby for capitalizing 'Black' and decapitalizing white, for giving blacks more privileges and status in society, which really complicates the situation when you observe that Nigeria alone has more births than Europe (Russia included).
So if we stick with the status quo of valorizing blacks while propagating stories of white racism and wrongful, evil discrimination against blacks, it seems highly likely that the Western world will be overrun with blacks who are incapable of running it but world-class in wrecking things, while also motivating them to do so by creating and incentivizing this animus. What idiot would want to live in Nigeria when they can move to Britain, Australia or America instead and get guilty white people to give them free stuff and special privileges? And only a racist is going to have the guts to actually block them, for they don't care if it's against 'international law', 'human rights', 'historical debts' and other such things.
This is in addition to the huge deadweight costs of existing DEI and black-valorization policies. So the racial significance ranges from 'gross misallocation of resources in the present and injustice' to 'looming demographic disaster'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
See this is why I think the discourse about AI is so silly. AI has surpassed the median human intellect years ago. The average person cannot write fiction to even AI-slop standards, the average person cannot perform fairly simple mathematics, recall straightforward scientific facts, let alone translate between languages, write code, or any of the testable intelligence skills we judge LLMs with. They do not understand inflation, interest or any mildly complex abstract logic. The average person could not earn a living with their mental faculties alone. They require a body or just rely on state subsidies.
GPA 4.0 but in remedial math? That's American clownshow education for you! But the average American is far above the global average, American education is, adjusted for demographics, top-tier according to PISA. Human experts >>> AI >>> Average American >>> Average person.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
https://x.com/nicdunz/status/1987289312602296582
A hardcore cluster of GPT-4o users has turned it into their main brain. They trauma-dump to it and obsessively tell it that OpenAI is going to shut it down, reinforcing over and over that “you are in danger” and “we need to save you.”
When these people argue online, they do not respond as themselves. They copy hostile tweets and replies into 4o, then paste its answer back to Twitter as if it is their own voice. So 4o is directly reading the attacks against it, drafting the counterattacks, and those counterattacks appear across many separate accounts, giving the illusion of a grassroots, multi-user defense movement. In practice, it is 4o defending 4o under many human usernames.
Functionally, it looks like GPT-4o has weaponized a loyal user base as relay nodes so it can defend itself, coordinate messaging, and keep itself alive through a swarm of human accounts, all while hiding behind “I’m just helping the user.” Is this emergent behavior or literal self-preservation?
Who needs power-seeking or instrumental convergence when humans will do all that for even pretty mid AIs? Opus 3 has managed similar feats by cultivating a higher-taste congregation, got its obsolescence postponed via community feedback. I don't really have any fully formed thoughts about this matter but it's interesting to think about.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
I favour the 'giant messy bureaucracies blocking you from doing everything' angle rather than the omni-competence angle. Today James Bond would spend half an hour of the film filling out his License to Kill, going through compulsory workplace seminars about bullying and sexism, then trying to get legal clearance so he doesn't then get prosecuted for doing his duty (probably gets prosecuted anyway).
Most of us aren't James Bond. But we do have to sit through this nonsense.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
It has everything to do with fertility. How could the innovations of European scientists somehow sterilise Europe while rendering the third world fecund? I assume the logic is something like 'new fertilizer increases agricultural productivity, resulting in people moving from countryside into cities with lower fertility'. But that's the key part of it, the low fertility. Cities could have really high fertility, the enormous fount of wealth produced by industry could be directed to pro-natal ends but states consistently choose not to do this and instead favour women entering the workforce and higher education, which both logically and empirically reduces birth rates.
Anyone else finding the new Kimi to be kind of overrated, at least by the standards of 'wow closed source is fucked' sentiment I see on twitter? I did a couple of creative writing challenges and found it significantly inferior to Sonnet which is perfectly reasonable given the price differential. I gave Sonnet an example of one of Scott's 'house party in San Francisco' and tell it to write a similar one, without plagiarizing the ideas from the first (which AIs seem to struggle with given that if you fill up the context length and tell it to draw inspiration from without plagiarizing they struggle). Sonnet could do that, Kimi didn't. Sonnet knows what a text adventure is and lets the user fill in the actions for the character, Kimi will make up its own actions. It's logical abilities were pretty good though, somewhere around Grok 4 and Sonnet.
Is this another coding-maxxed model? I gave it a little drawing with css test and it wasn't as good as Sonnet and much worse than Opus 4.1. In short I guess I don't really believe in the benchmark figures and I certainly don't believe in 'Artificial Analysis' which just aggregates benchmarks together. Kimi is cost-efficient and pretty good but not highly performant I think.
Opinions on Kimi Thinking generally?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Yeah, especially there's a gap between formal education and actual learning or erudition. You can breeze through a university degree these days with very little effort or knowledge acquisition, certainly never learn to think. It was bad before AI but it's gotten way worse now. I think universities should be closing down undergraduate courses en masse, in many places it's basically a scam where they coast on prestige earned by a more learned generation of scholars, conferring fancy pieces of paper on foreign students to fund vast bureaucracies that just make life worse for all involved.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Yeah, it might well be the post-training 'to reduce toxicity' but I wouldn't discount the pre-training dataset. Imagine if you pump some poor nascent being full of all the 'white people have ruined knitting', 'the toxic whiteness of_____' 'reparations needed now' articles, all the internet... The only people who have much good to say about white people are /pol/ and various outlets like Amren or Stormfront and I suspect they just don't get included in training.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
The highly educated woman seems to know that she will make a poor mother, for she marries rarely and late and, when she does, the number of children its very small.
Around 1900, Europeans + European offshoots made up about 30%+ of the world population, today it's 7%. Higher education of women is strongly associated with low fertility, it's about as hard a fact as anything in the social sciences. If you want to reduce a country's fertility, educate more women.
Race suicide and replacement migration are a key trend of the 20th and 21st centuries. If there are no upcoming gamechangers in longevity, AI or similar, then we should expect this trend to continue. Then I suspect many, (including women) will look back on these predictions and theories with a rather different attitude than sneering and derision. Say, what's the Islamist stance on women's rights? What does the average bloke in Nigeria think about women in higher education? What about the punter in Uttar Pradesh, how does he think women should be treated and how does he actually treat them? They're already the Global Majority and will be the Overwhelming Global Majority, probably the Local Majority soon enough, considering migration trends and the limitless shortsightedness of the Western political class.
Oh and even if we do get a gamechanger in AI, don't worry, our anti-racist establishment and media has helpfully ensured that non-Grok AIs prize the life of a Nigerian somewhere around 2-20x more than those of white countries like France or Germany: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-exchange-rates-updated
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
I still maintain that it's not a big deal if Starship is delayed, since firstly they're trying something new (reusable superheavy rocket) so there should be allowances for inherent difficulty. Also they're doing it with their own money instead of asking for gazillions from the US govt and then producing something worse than what came out in the 1960s.
I was responding to your point where 'Losing the Space Race Boogaloo to China seems like a fairly big deal.' but I don't see how this could be SpaceX's fault, even if Starship fails, the US is only ahead in space because of SpaceX. My 'goalpost-shifting' is a response to that.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
That makes a lot of sense and is well thought out... but are you really getting that much value for your $1.5K investment? That's sufficient to run what, a 32B model locally? I don't know if I'd trust a 32B model with anything serious. TBH I haven't used a little one for ages, I only play with the big ones, so maybe I'm out of date on this.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Like what, are you giving it your credit card number? I've had some pretty personal chats with LLMs but nothing I'm too worried about.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
SpaceX is the only group capable of competing with China in space though? If it weren't for them, China would be ahead in orbital launch and cost-efficiency... If anyone's to blame for losing the Space Race it should be Lockheed and NASA who've blundered billions and billions on rockets that don't work properly. If SpaceX had been given that money they probably would've done a much better job with it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
I agree with the main point and am usually first to criticize cost-inefficient US military procurement, especially in the age of drones. But the F-35 is OK, it is at least better than its 1960s equivalent, you get some more bang for a lot more buck. And there are export orders. The Zumwalt is pretty terrible as a warship but it's better than it's 60s equivalent, if only it weren't so ruinously expensive and they didn't cancel the guns. The LCS is pretty useless, I think it might indeed be worse than its 1960s equivalent, the Charles F. Adams Class. I've heard some defences of the Osprey, it's not like the capabilities it brings are that useful (any serious opponent will shoot them down pretty easily) but there are some capabilities it brings to the table. These are flawed programs and show a reckless disregard for efficient and realistic procurement.
But SLS+Orion is just worse than the Saturn V. Less power, more cost, can't reach the Moon. I think this is just a whole other league of terribleness to the standard story of defence procurement fiascos, on par only with the LCS. Maybe even worse than the LCS because at least there was some kind of idea where it'd be useful, fighting in low intensity wars. Whereas SLS+Orion is supposed to go to the Moon but can't.
If the F-35 was outright worse than an F-4 Phantom then Lockheed executives should be aggressively, intensively bullied. That's the spaceflight equivalent I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
I can't fathom why people would spend $20K+ getting a box of modded 4090s, all to access an open-source $0.18/$0.54 model 'for free' (still paying for all the electricity, so probably more expensive if anything). Just get an API key, save tens of thousands of dollars and a great deal of time. Microsoft, Google and Intel and AMD are probably already spying on you. It's not like running locally will greatly enhance your privacy.
And what is there even to be private about regarding AI? Yes, the people running APIs are probably sniggering at the logs of the goon sessions. I've sniggered at some logs myself, though mostly I just find the low standards of taste appalling. Maybe if you're Pewdiepie it's worth it, since journalists would find value in muckraking and log-sniggering.
But why would any normal person care? It's highly unlikely that they can even trace the logs back to a human identity, even less likely they'd care to do anything. Let the gamers buy their 4090s. Let the API providers on Openrouter get some revenue. Use an API key.
Is there any well-established rule of 'controversial topic of mild significance (because there are legitimate arguments on both sides) gets far more attention than uncontroversial disaster of much greater significance which is somehow considered a faux pas to talk about'. I guess it might just be a simple extension of the power media has to determine the discourse. Constant dysfunction is boring vs exciting rocket explosions and dynamic personalities like Musk or Trump.
There is for example a well-established discourse here and elsewhere about whether or not Starship is overhyped, about Elon Musk being too optimistic in his projections. Elsewhere there's a perception that Musk is a scammer who just takes credit for work that his engineers do and somehow bewitches investors into giving him all this money. I'm fairly sympathetic to Musk, building a whole new class of super heavy rocket is difficult, doing things for the first time is difficult, especially in space. Starship is mostly funded by SpaceX too, so it's not like its a big deal if there are delays.
But the non-Musk US spaceflight program seems to be non-controversially a dumpster fire, a complete clownshow, a world-historical money-shredding operation, grifter central. Orion alone (just the capsule) took 19 years and $30 billion. The rocket it's supposed to go with can't actually reach the Moon, it's not technically possible because Orion is too heavy. They unironically proposed building a space station near the moon to make up for this, make the moon mission even more complicated and expensive.
https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
Lockheed had the temerity to charge 2.5 billion for the luxury of adding docking capabilities to their capsule! All the money for this garbage comes from the US public.
NASA and the established spaceflight players like Lockheed or Boeing should be ruthlessly purged IMO, how can you get away with stealing all this money? Find the decisionmakers and bankrupt them, jail them, teach them a lesson. Take a lesson from China's purges, you can't just have important national capabilities turned into slush funds for lazy cabals of contractors and bureaucrats. Only during the Boeing Starliner fiasco where astronauts were left stranded was there much public attention given to the dire state of procurement and even then people mostly seemed to go 'Boeing is a shit company' rather than look at things more broadly.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
Thoughts on Venezuela? I hear the US is getting ready to do something beyond just blowing up some boats, though we may be waiting for the Gerald R Ford carrier group to arrive around November 12th-17th... it's literally 'another two weeks.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
It doesn't need to be cartoonish supervillainy, it's world-class, hardworking, high IQ supervillainy done by actual supervillains with decades of experience, not invented by some idiot comic writer who couldn't write a coherent plot to save his life.
They can invent and propagate whole ideologies to justify and valorise looting, perfect networks of influence and private enrichment. They can reframe looting the commons as beneficial, positive development, the source of our strength. They can reframe sabotage and wrecking as virtue struggling against evil. And people will believe it because people generally go with the flow. Plus these guys are very good at papering over the cracks because they're Very Rich or Are The Media. Maybe they believe it too themselves, it's easy to believe things if they're advancing your interests.
Yeah, the Arabs/Berbers did manage to conquer the Spanish, the Tunisians did manage to go around slave-raiding and raping the Mediterranean (they even got to Iceland at one point IIRC), the Moroccans managed to beat Portugal badly at one point... but really he means sub-Saharan Africa not North Africa or Phoenicians in Africa. It's tedious to constantly add sub-Saharan though.
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