RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
The grown man failed to win in the last fist fight. We already had the whole 'Houthis fucked around and now they're gonna find out' arc a year ago where everyone thought the combined might of NATO and the US fleet would quickly crush them. But Red Sea shipping remains 50% below what it was and we got all these articles about how the ships were firing million dollar interceptors at drones costing 100th of the price.
Surely the US doesn't need any more wars in the Middle East?
The trouble is that the Jewish lobby in the US is a gigantic colossus and the Palestinian lobby is a shrieking buzzard. So we see strong US support for Israel and all kinds of negative consequences for the US. It's not like the Israelis are ever going to send troops to help the US in any war, they've never done so before.
False Israeli intelligence about WMDs helped to motivate the Iraq War, the Jewish lobby was eager for that particular disaster. They clearly aren't advancing US interests.
At this moment, the US military surely has more important tasks than bombing Yemen, bombing Yemen has been tried and found wanting. It didn't work when Biden and the Saudis tried it and probably won't work when Trump does it. It's a waste of ordnance and air defences. World sea lanes need to be secured but it's clearly quite difficult for the US to do so militarily. Diplomacy should be tried.
A better solution would be to cut off the Israelis from the military aid teat and make a deal with Yemen. This principle of jettisoning Israel isn't limited to Yemen, it would reduce many problems. It would reduce tension with Iran, it would make diplomacy with the Arab states and Turkey easier, it'd improve relations with Indonesia and Pakistan too. This doesn't mean favouring Palestine or anything, jettisoning them would be fine too. China's cordial Middle East relations should be the target: trade with the sheikhs and get along with them, build some infrastructure, get some oil.
But to achieve this, the Jewish lobby would need to be defanged in the US. Getting to neutrality requires moving in a direction.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
That is quite strange. It should've been https://old.reddit.com/r/TheDeepCore/comments/ll19bs/12x12_political_compass_for_star_wars/
I like the EU as much as anyone. I like how in the Thrawn books they try and rationalize the setting, make things seem more logical and explain Endor as the fleet being borg-slaved to the Emperor so it unravelled after he died... I like this ridiculously big EU political compass: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheDeepCore/comments/ll19bs/12x12_political_compass_for_star_wars/
But if 4km long, thin, pointy Star Destroyers are rare and expensive capital ships, how are the Imperials able to build a 160 km wide, spherical Death Star, then make good progress on an even bigger one 4 years after the first is lost? The black budget for superweapons surely can't be more than 5% of the economy, or even half the military budget. We only know of a few highly industrialized planets in the Empire, Kuat and Corellia for instance. There doesn't seem to be much broad-based wealth, nor does the administration seem very efficient if there are large pools of Hutts, smugglers and bounty hunters running around doing their own thing.
They should not be capable of building gigantic moonsized planetbusters if they can't field thousands and thousands of star destroyers.
Lucasfilm and Disney do not understand the logic of wealth and military procurement, there's no basic sense of understanding scale. Putting to one side all the expert analysis of Star Wars scale they do on spacebattles (for instance here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/star-wars-mass-of-a-star-destroyer.464536/) it just doesn't make any sense. The Kaminoans supplied 300,000 clones for the Republic with a million more well on the way! That's about enough to secure Ukraine, not the galaxy. The First Order somehow manage to produce an even bigger planetary superweapon that eats stars. Palpatine manages to throw together a gigantic fleet of Star Destroyers from a hidden planet at the edge of the galaxy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
All that is interesting, but why not bring say... ten droidekas with you as a personal escort, so you can beat any Jedi that pop out at you? Stalin had maybe 15-25 NKVD protecting him at all times but Yoda can walk right up to Darth Sidious in his throne room, knock out two guards and fight in a totally deserted senate hall?
Why weren't there at least 100 elite clone commandoes equipped with anti-jedi weaponry protecting the supreme chancellor in the hours after he launches a purge of the Jedi temple? None of it makes sense!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
If you have upper Kardashev II, then you wouldn't see space battles of maybe 80 big ships on both sides, like Endor or Coruscant. You'd see 80 billion ships slugging it out over months.
This is a setting where glorified teddy bears with sticks and stones manage to overcome thousands of highly trained professional soldiers with heavy weapons! It doesn't make sense and that's fine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The economics of Star Wars are a complete mess. They can build moon-sized battlestations that vaporize planets (not to mention Starkiller Base!), implying Kardashev II capabilities in mass and energy manipulation... that aren't displayed anywhere else in the setting.
Better not to think about it too hard. It really doesn't make sense for all key political events to be decided by the outcome of 1v1 lightsaber duels either but it's cool!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I have nothing against settler colonialism in general and it wasn't even part of my main point, nearly everyone has done it at some time or another.
To a certain extent Russia is gaining Russians by invading Ukraine, Israel isn't gaining Jews by annexing various parts of Palestine, they're just securing land. That's relevant to hydro's point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Most of the people in Donbass, Crimea and so on are Russian. They speak Russian, many of them are fighting for Russia.
Russians seizing a part of the world with cities founded by Catherine the Great, literally named Novorossiya, isn't settler colonialism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
new Russian territory is not recognized by the "international community"
Israel's settlements aren't recognized by the international community, yet they persist and expand. This war is about facts on the ground, not words on a page. Sanctions are a perfect example: Russian oil just goes via India off to Europe. The demand for luxury European cars has risen enormously in Azerbaijan...
Besides Ukraine, Europe is also a clear loser, even if they're brave enough to seize Russian assets. Apparently the war already cost Europe some 700 billion Euros by mid-2023:
if you include the support that the European governments have had to pay in order to help their families and firms to face the high prices of electricity, of food, the subsidies to our people in order to face the consequences of the war is €700 billion – ten times more than the support for Ukraine.
https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/singapore-speech-hrvp-borrell-shangri-la-dialogue_en
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
some hard evidence, some video footage, or some audio recording to point at
Well the arch-paedophile (or some high-ranking member) somehow managed to kill himself despite being on suicide watch, before trial. And somehow the camera footage of this anomaly disappeared. What's the simplest explanation?
It's like the Wuhan lab losing all their documents in September 2019, how their 'let's put furin cleavage sites in a bat coronavirus' research proposal was rather similar to the bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site that emerged near Wuhan lab!
How the conspiracy works is still unclear but it's pretty visible that there was some kind of conspiracy. We don't need hard evidence to know that something was happening, especially when there are incentives to prevent any hard evidence coming to light.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Thomas Aquinas was definitely intelligent, we are still talking about his books centuries after his death. He absolutely had impact and significance. Most of what he writes is basically nonsense but that's the nature of theology.
Maybe you can be intelligent and not do anything significant. But doing something significant requires intelligence. Given that we can't read minds and analyse them perfectly, we should assume that those who do great things have greater faculties than those who merely claim to be intelligent.
So I find it disgusting for a nobody like Hanania to go 'oh I listened to him on a podcast and read some tweets of this guy, so I can look down on his intelligence, his basic mental faculties'. That's what I'm upset with.
I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022
Furthermore, how is Hanania in a position to judge? Does he know anything of significance? What operations has he overseen? What high-performance organization has he built?
If you're down-rating Elon Musk's intelligence in favour of 'luck or arbitrary fortune', where is your reasoning that it's actually straightforward to build a rocket company or start a leading AI lab (which he did while Hanania thinks his brain was broken)? Is NASA too busy huffing airhorn gas to make cheap rockets? Is Meta AI full of dribbling retards? Did Jeff Bezos just roll bad dice with his space company? Obviously not! It's the special competence of this one man, with secrets that we don't understand regarding management, motivation and so on.
How is Musk broken if he achieves massive successes in science, engineering, business and politics?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Musk is not some baron or duke. His inheritance was by no means significant in him becoming wealthy.
'Personality type' is just a different way of saying intelligence in this context. 'I am smart but lazy' is an excuse, not an explanation. It doesn't matter at all if you're smart in some esoteric way that has no relevance in the real world. Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken.
Criticizing faults is fine but it is bizarre and question-begging for people who are in virtually every way less competent to criticize the ability of far more capable people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
How is Elon Musk good at politics?
How much political influence does Elon Musk have in the US? Politics isn't about popularity. Taylor Swift is pretty popular. Is she good at politics? No.
Elon is a super successful businessman so he can't be wrong about Zelenskyy being a dictator with a 4% approval rating who started the Russian-Ukraine War?
Tweet accuracy does not determine whether someone's brain is broken. Advancing a message in accordance with one's goals is more important than factual accuracy. Trump does this all the time, he blows up every number 2-5x. Doing that has no relation to his political ability, it is beyond doubt that his political ability is immense.
If your brain is broken, then you'd be saying things like Biden did: "And now I want to hand it over to the President of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination, ladies and gentlemen, President Putin". That is what having a broken brain looks like, when you're not on-message, when you're so far off-message that you're supporting the other side.
Elon knows more about the war in Ukraine than the entire Pentagon. Not because he knows the ins and outs of every calibre of artillery, not because he pores over every inch of satellite intel and reads every single powerpoint slide... but because he appreciates the basic strategic dynamics of the situation and adjusts his stance accordingly: 'if military victory is not cost-efficient, use diplomacy to minimize losses'. And if getting rid of Zelensky helps this, then he'll move in that direction with 'get rid of Zelensky' rather than getting bogged down in juvenile narratives like 'Putin is a bully' like our prestigious, military expert class who work day and night bungling everything they touch. Note that Elon started off super-pro Ukraine, donating them hundreds of millions worth of military aid in Starlink. He changed his stance to match the situation. Appreciating the key facets is better than racking up debating point trivia.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Hanania said he was anti-woke, he made all these posts about it. He was seemingly angling to be a public intellectual and influence US policy in various respects before flip-flopping and burning his bridges.
In that scenario, it makes sense to not come out and sneer at Trump. It's called tact, diplomacy, political skill. Or is Hanania just an internet troll with a substack?
Furthermore, I am highly confident that Elon Musk has demonstrated a high level of business ability and 'making things happen' in the last 3 years. Tesla is just one of his businesses. Tesla is exactly where it was in July 2024 or November 2024 in stock price. It's a 700 billion dollar company manufacturing goods in competition with China, which is extremely difficult. Maybe Elon can't be expected to run Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and GrokAI at a world-class level simultaneously, while also rearranging US politics? Maybe he can only keep 3 or 4 balls in the air at once, he's still pretty good at juggling. People who have never juggled aren't qualified to sneer at the abilities of the best jugglers, that's my point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Even an omniscient AI would still fight a war. War is about using force to achieve a political goal. If you have force and a goal, you can have a war. Rationality has nothing to do with it. Even if a party knows that it will lose a war, they will often continue fighting out of internal political considerations and spiteful hatred.
Hatred is rational. You would rather face a conciliatory pushover than a hateful, spiteful opponent.
Anyway, some AIs will be smarter than others and so they'll be stronger.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
But I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people with fewer than Musk's 219 million Twitter followers who you and I would agree are smarter or more reliable guides
There are absolutely people I agree with more often than Musk. There are some people online who I think are very wise and I agree with basically everything they say. Whereas I disagree with many things that Musk says, we clearly have different goals and understanding of the world. So there are people wiser than Musk.
But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path? Musk wants to settle Mars, so he simply takes over the entire spaceflight market with SpaceX. The Democratic Party/decel culture gets in his way, so he moves to smash them with Twitter and Trump. AI coming up sooner than expected, looks like that's important? Why not simply start a frontier lab? Electric cars and robots as well!
These are impressive achievements! It is hard to create things, rather than merely performing a role for someone else like so many. Try starting your own business. It's hard on a wholly different level.
When Bieber demonstrates general-purpose creative ability (at maybe 10 or 100 times his net worth), as opposed to just being a one-trick pony in music/infatuating young women, then I'll defend his general ability. Taylor Swift does the same thing better than Bieber and has basically no political influence (her endorsement had minimal effect), Musk is on a totally different level.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Biden was never smart or capable, his first presidential campaign crashed because he lied about being first in his class and plagiarizing. Pretty poor on 'not sounding like a fool in speeches' and 'avoiding scandals' too. Elon can sometimes sound like a fool in speeches and he is scandal-prone but there are other redeeming qualities that are lacking with Biden.
I don't know what selection mechanisms exist in the Democratic Party for leadership material but the people that gave us Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are clearly not prioritizing skills and ability.
You can be successful without being smart. Clearly I erred in tying 'smart' and 'successful' together when I was primarily talking about the allegations that Elon broke his brain. Most of the time you need to be smart to be successful.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
If he's doing those things, then is he destroying his brain with drugs? What about Meta, what have they been doing? Has Zuckerberg been destroying his brain with drugs throwing $20 billion into VR with zero returns and with Meta AI getting defenestrated by Grok 3 and Deepseek, not to mention kowtowing to Trump after he won the election rather than supporting him before, like Elon? Running these huge organizations is difficult. There are ups and downs.
The elite, prestigious sources of information have discredited themselves. They go on and on about climate change (nothingburger) and demand extremely costly and ineffective fixes. They came up with DEI and globalized the whole US race obsession. They swept Rotherham under the carpet and brought us the summer of Floyd. They've damaged relations between the sexes considerably. They cheered for the retard wars in the middle east. They spurred political division by blundering obsessively and then screeching misinformation when anyone tried to point out their inadequacy.
The damage caused by the narratives they put out far exceeds anything Musk and far-right anime profile pics have done.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
The US/allied theory of victory is mostly cope, rehashing the Cold War strategy of technological superiority to overcome numerical inferiority.
Only it's hard to retain technological superiority against a state with such a gigantic amount of STEM talent and a non-broken economic system ruthlessly prioritizing capital investment and technological superiority.
Plus numerical inferiority will be staggering. Chinese shipbuilding capacity is roughly 52-55% of world shipbuilding, roughly in line with their steel production. We're just not winning a naval war here, it's not going to happen. The little formation that circumnavigated Australia recently has roughly similar firepower (measured by VLS tubes) as the whole Australian navy - Australia is a useful ally for something like subordinating Papua New Guinea or clobbering sand people with special forces but we have negligible competence or firepower in a war of mass. South Korea and Japan are both heavily reliant on food/fuel imports and are de facto islands, they will struggle to sustain a long war against such a big power despite being somewhat serious. And we should assume a long war, all great power wars become long wars.
What stops China executing a full-court press over the Pacific, sweeping elan, training, tactics, fortifications and all else aside with numbers and production capacity just like the US did to Japan? Only temporary factors like the size of the US navy at present, incomplete Chinese autarky... But Chinese autarky is developing and the US navy is still shrinking!
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/02/the-u-s-navy-has-a-big-problem-shrinking-away-to-nothing/
What hope do we have when the biggest, strongest power in the bloc is withering away in peacetime!
The worst thing is that the Western world has decided that it's impossible for us to strike first, that's apparently unthinkably unsportsmanlike behaviour. Never mind that we have rapidly diminishing advantages in fleet tonnage, areas of technological superiority and training. We also have to concede the opportunity for the first strike, take another Pearl Harbour. This 'serious and thoughtful' blogger (clearly ex-military or otherwise initiated in these matters) wants to systematically eradicate Chinese military industry and academia but still refuses to consider a first strike: https://navy-matters.blogspot.com/2018/10/china-war-setting-stage.html
The grand plan is to fight the final battle for world dominance with a shrinking fleet against a continuously growing industrial juggernaut... letting them pick the time and place for the final showdown? What have our thought leaders been huffing?
I lay the blame on lib-racism. If you go back and read The Rising Tide of Colour you will ironically find a much more measured and sophisticated analysis of world affairs from a white supremacist writing 100 years ago than soaks through in vibes and in media today. Stoddard believed that the Nordic race was the master race with innately superior martial qualities and yet he still concluded that the Chinese were a serious threat through numbers and sheer tenacity if nothing else. He made the hypothesis that even though European troops would be better at fighting, when it comes to long marches and enduring privations the Chinese could even the odds. And indeed we saw something like that in Korea where clever Chinese tactics, night marches and similar proved highly effective against firepower superiority.
Of course, caring about how tough one's soldiers are in forced marches is suited more for the world of 100 years ago than today. But the abstract logic of looking at the situation as it is rather than as we'd like it to be is rare indeed. Maybe the country that wins all the physics and chemistry olympiads is good at physics and chemistry? Maybe the people that produce so much of the world's manufactured products would be extremely tough to fight in wartime? Maybe the country that's producing the most robots will have highly efficient industry? Perhaps the country that makes the most drones will be advantaged in the drone age? None of this is an extraordinary leap of logic, yet everyone seems to miss it.
People assume that the Chinese fleet is all 'Chinesium', that the concrete can be punched through, it's all slave labour and cheap copying, all their figures are invented and surely they'll collapse soon to the property bubble... Maybe in this fantasy world it is reasonable to let them get in the first blow and control the sequence of events. But we don't live in the fantasy. We can't rely on the B-21 or NGAD showing up to save everything, NGAD may not even arrive at all. There are going to be Chinese equivalents produced at growing speed and numbers (as we are seeing this year) because they have a rich country with vast resources to tap. Meanwhile our resources seem to be shrinking away into the ether and we can't seem to beat Yemen or outproduce Russia. This bodes ill.
I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022
Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth. Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever? No. If anything he shot himself in the foot switching from 'I'm a smart tech-right policy guy' to 'let me sneer at all the right-wing retards who are now running the country and are in a position to implement policies'. He's the contrarian rat that jumps on board the sinking ship. What a fool!
Elon may indeed have lost some of his faculties, idk, I've never met the man. I doubt Hanania has either. Armchair psychoanalysis of extremely unusual people is basically just glorified name-calling.
Whatever Elon has lost, if anything, he still makes the rest of the world look like drooling retards. What did I get done in the last 3 years, since 2022? I certainly didn't start an AI company that's outperforming Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I didn't build the biggest datacentre on the planet at record speed.
It's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree with Elon's choices or think he should do something else. I disagree with Elon about many things, including his whole concept of what a state is for. But if people want to go around calling him dumb or saying that his brain 'broke', then we'd better have some serious achievements to prove that we know what 'smart' or 'successful' is! Certainly something better than 'I wrote a book rehashing Mearsheimer (nobody cares about it) and blew up my political career' like Hanania.
Why should anyone care what Hanania thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it? He was pivoting away from Trump while Elon pivoted towards Trump... I think it's clear who has better political skills and like everything else between them, it's an orders of magnitude difference.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Deepseek R1 is surely better at maths than most people on this forum and doubtless far superior to this doctor: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1i5r85h/deepseekr1_scored_100_on_a_2023_a_levels/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Maybe she just has really low ability in maths but has otherwise fine working memory and similar.
Some people are like that.
And she can just use AI for maths.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
"When in a critical military situation, outnumbered and outgunned, further disperse your forces by attacking elsewhere and expanding the front" isn't going to be making the director's cut of the Art of War.
Especially since the original goal was to use parts of Kursk as a way to get other land back. This clearly hasn't worked.
It defies reason that the best way to defend Pokrovsk would be to attack Kursk. The forces committed to Kursk could've been simply sent to defend Pokrovsk and stabilize the front there.
Nobody knows what's going to happen in the next 5 years, let alone 15-20.
Would you expect anyone to predict the world we live in today from 5 years ago?
Now stock markets are all about prediction and so we have to make bets based on what we think will happen. But it seems extremely bold to make such a long-term prediction that nothing big will be discovered in the next 15 years, there'll be no epoch-shaking events! I also think big things in AI are imminent and being realized, 15-20 years is a very conservative timeline for transformative development on that front.
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