RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10hr ago
There's no power on Earth that can threaten it on its home turf
The primary purpose of any army is the defense of its nation
What about the Somali fraudsters robbing American taxpayers? The cartel gangsters? The fentanyl from Chinese precursors that the cartel gangsters import? That's what, 70,000 deaths a year? It's not just China's fault (takes two to die of a fent overdose) but they do use fentanyl precursor exports as part of their diplomatic efforts to impose pressure on America. Fentanyl is an instrument of Chinese power, like the PLA is. A more limited instrument, certainly, but an instrument nonetheless.
There's a divide in international relations between people who just talk about hard power and state warfare as 'security' and then the liberals who talk about food security, energy security, economic security, political security, institutional security...
I think the latter have a point even if they usually express it in a limpwristed way. What good is it if Chinese paratroopers can't land in America but Chinese spies can take wealth out of America, steal the F-35 secrets? Does it matter to Chuck and Hank that their factory didn't get bombed by an H-20, their business was just wrecked by some Chinese hackers stealing their IP, passing it on to domestic firms who undercut them? The result is the same, the latter is better even for China since they didn't have to pay much for the bombs and they expanded their stock of national wealth.
Sure, Chuck and Hank aren't getting bayonets pointed at them, they're not made to salute the Chinese flag. Maybe they're not Minnesotans, living under the Somali flag. Chuck and Hank have lost small, not big... but a small loss is still a loss.
The F-35 is also an example of decadence. All these politicians demand production facilities in their state for political reasons. They aren't interested in the national interest, which would demand a few large production plants for economical production and efficiencies of scale. The bloat and waste is seriously harmful to America, China isn't a minnow that can be slapped aside with a few swipes. America needs to be smart to beat a country 4x bigger.
Or from another angle, the Fang Yuan school of conflict strategy prioritizes these asymmetric, cost-efficient and subversive looting campaigns. 'When weak, subvert the social structure and disguises to extract loot without punishment, use loot to become strong, when strong slaughter and loot openly. Repeat as necessary.' It'd be very easy to say 'oh he's not a big deal, even if he beat us in a few fights and steals a little wealth we're still the rulers of the world, we can lose again and again because of how big and strong we are' but then he shows up in Heavenly Court with Unlimited Qi Sea and they all get very quiet and very serious. They made a big error by not squashing him when he was small.
Just because nobody is bombing American homes right now, doesn't mean it won't happen.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21hr ago
Firstly I'm not actually American but Australian, I guess maybe I was unclear with the 'we', I meant that the motte and the world at large only recently stumbled on this matter.
Secondly, I think there's an important distinction between internal disputes, corruption and resource reallocation and foreigners coming in to take resources. It's like crime vs warfare. Criminals get punished, enemies get killed. Ingroup outgroup distinction.
I guess you might say I'm being too vague about what decadence really is, I think it's like a magnet with domains all jumbled up, not pointing in one direction. Adam wants cheap labour, Bert wants loyal voter blocs, Charlie wants to stuff his face with food and not care about politics, Derek wants kickbacks from rich foreigners, Emma wants those poor people overseas to have human rights, Frank wants tax cuts without spending cuts... (Flavius wants to be emperor, Julius wants to be emperor, Octavius wants to be emperor,, Antonius wants to hire those cheap Gothic warriors since Romans these days don't want to fight) Anyway, Americans are not all aligned with advancing US interests, making America and Americans strong. They got complacent and stopped pushing forwards, then get ensnared by foreign interests and growing reliance on foreigners. Decadence starts slow but it gets worse and worse over time.
The Somalis who are constantly crowing about their love of and loyalty to Somalia (and sending huge amounts of money to Somalia) aren't real Americans, in my opinion. I'm not American so I guess I can't be too authoritative about this but I feel like I'm on pretty strong ground here. They show no loyalty to America. They make obnoxious tiktoks about how they're coming to take over America: https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1997759022666297662
SOMALI: “My biggest fear in life is that Trump may never witness our full takeover of America. We’re here. We’re not leaving.”
OK, it's just one guy there, Ilhan Omar and the ex-PM of Somalia over here, a few billion dollars over some years (10s of billions? More?)... Even a few billion dollars is worth caring about. How many lifetimes worth of labour have Minnesotans done only for some Somali to take it? The British didn't let the Chinese get away with disrespecting their merchants selling drugs in China, they fucked China up for that slight. That's real vigour and will.
A few hundred thousand Somalis haven't collapsed America. But they do way more damage than they should be doing, it's as if they have a 10,000x multiplier on their effectiveness against Americans that they're extracting wealth from a much stronger power. It's this effect that is the root cause of US woes. Just being united and nationalist/tribalist is an incredible source of strength. The American auto-immune system is broken, any strong leader would've gotten rid of these people or never let them in but Trump can't seem to manage it, he announces and threatens but can't seem to get rid of them because some judge nobody ever heard of will block him while Will Stancil's people will shriek and blow airhorns and get shot dead defending them... Decadence.
China does the same kind of sneaky subversion, that's how they got so powerful and menacing. They stole a tonne of IP from the US and elsewhere, they make the Somalis look like complete failures in their fraud. Anything Somalis can do, China can do better after all. They bewitched the US into cooperating with their exploitation, they bewitched the US into not stomping China when they had complete military dominance.
the US military is still the best in the world
What good has it achieved for America? The US military beat Saddam and derailed their modernization plans in Iraq. China bought up the oil wells and started to catch up. The US military 'secured' the Middle East, so that China could import their oil safely and creep forward in the South China Sea unmolested. The US blew up Libya and caused a serious political crisis in their European allies. The US tried to bomb Yemen, failed to reopen the Red Sea to traffic, then made a deal with the Houthis.
American leaders are floating around in never never land talking about vibes like 'freedom' or 'democracy' or 'human rights' or 'freedom of the seas' and the Chinese are saying whatever magic words help them in the moment to advance their true goals, doing whatever advances Chinese national strength.
The US kidnapped Maduro. That's a show of power, albeit against a country so incompetent they can't even maintain their own oil industry. But what was the point of the flex? Trump's stated objective seemed to be to secure the oil - only nobody wants to invest in Venezuela, still ruled by the commies, still with a weak oil industry, given current oil prices are low. It was another fundamentally misguided military intervention.
There is an Iran war coming up which will probably be a complete shitshow. We were told the US completely destroyed the Fordow nuclear facility, a devastating blow. It didn't even last six months, apparently they need to go in again to stop the Iranian nuclear program which has been six months away from a nuke for the last 30 years. Woolly thinking in US leaders, deceived, constantly misdirected, ever trusting, paying the price for the gains of others.
The US is simultaneously trying to confront Russia in Ukraine, Iran in the Middle East and China in the Pacific. The US didn't trounce China back when China was weak, they let China walk all over them. All these little cuts and tapeworms are wearing down US power.
Decadence is when you're trying to do too much with too little, a kind of complacency about sustaining one's own strength, a lack of wisdom and good judgement. Imagine how strong and rich America would be without those trillions squandered in the Middle East, with realpolitik instead of random blundering, no DEI officers in the military, not letting IP be stolen without punishment, not corroding patriotic ideals that are the basis of military recruitment... What if the dollars that went to Somalia were invested in hypersonic missiles or just producing artillery shells?
China would be prey, not predator.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22hr ago
He goes to all this effort getting food. And then the tapeworm eats it, not him, so he has to get more food for his own needs. That's pretty humiliating, especially since it's a literal worm.
I agree with a lot of your points, it is indeed true that just being a tougher warrior is not sufficient to win in a war. Imperial Japan fought very hard, man for man I'd argue they were better fighters than American or Australian troops. But it's not just man for man but shell for shell, plane for plane, actually having supplies. The outcome was decided by materiel factors like you say.
But...
Somalia has had a shit time since 1991
the US has not lost a single war that mattered
Who's stronger, Somalia or America? No contest. The United States with its thousands of H-bombs is vastly weaker than Somalia.
The loot goes from the US to Somalia. We had a huge episode of that unearthed just recently, Somalis milking the US government for billions. They speak openly about how they're working for Somalia, they're advancing Somali interests not US interests. The ex-PM of Somalia openly speaks to Somalis about how Ilhan Omar isn't for America, she's for Somalia: https://x.com/AFpost/status/1807495759056470057 (I see no community notes so I assume this is accurate)
'The interests of Ilhan are not Ilhans, it's not the interests of Minnesota, it's not the interests of the American people, it's the interest of Somalians and Somalia'
There are Somalis running and robbing US cities, how many Americans are running and robbing Somali cities? What is that if not strength? That is what strength is for, moving the loot around.
Somalia doesn't even need to beat America in warfare, their superiority is so vast that warfare is irrelevant. Somalia crushes! Somalis literally conduct humiliation rituals like having their puppet governor change the Minnesota flag to make it look like a Somali flag. The Somalian economy is largely based on remittances, 25-50%. A large chunk of that is loot from America.
I don't mean that in a triumphalist or insulting sense, I think it's massively retarded and deeply unnatural that Somalia is beating America like a pinata for loot. It's not a glorious, proof-of-work type strength like a ground campaign. Nobody thinks that Somalia's military excellence, based on organizational superiority translates into a superior culture. The most well-known cultural innovation of Somalia is female genital mutilation. Nobody is ever going to sing songs about the heroism of the fraudsters at the Quality Learing Centre because they're reprobates. But these are people demonstrably worsening life in the heartland of the US, basically robbing taxpayers, subverting US governance. I consider that a defeat.
What is that if not an example of degeneracy and decadence, where this nuclear superpower is getting humiliated by a shithole country? I accept that I'm using emotional language here but I think it's very important to recalibrate how we conceive of strength and power. I think that the narrative of 'jets, tanks, logistics, training, numbers and technology' is genuinely true enough to be convincing but limited enough to be dangerous. Watching the F-35 or B-2 flyby over the Big Game lulls Americans into a comfortable sleep - and then they get beaten like a pinata for loot by some of the ugliest countries on the map.
There isn't just the military strength of America and Somalia, that's lopsided. There is political strength, will, cameraderie. That is where Somalia and Afghanistan and many other shitholes have their advantage. The power of group solidarity is a force greater than any technological terror created (thus far). It is overwhelmingly superior to the hydrogen bomb, the carrier group, anything America can put into the field.
I know about the argument that 'oh it's an internal struggle between different factions of US elites' but I don't think it holds. When Byzantium has its 600th civil war and loses provinces to Bulgaria or the Arabs, that's a real defeat for the Byzantines. When Korean court intrigues result in them letting their army rot and constantly imprisoning their best generals, that's genuine military failure. When Polish elected monarchy fails by letting foreign powers bribe their nobles into vetoing everything and then carve up the whole country (Poland-Lithuania: terror of the Turks, the Saviour of Vienna!) with barely a struggle, you better believe that's a real defeat. Letting other nations infest and parasitize your politics is just as bad as being humiliated on the battlefield, in so far as the results are the same. War is about politics, about dominance, about the distribution of loot. Payment of tribute is an ancient custom of defeated nations.
More recently, people charted other biases and found that most models had clear biases in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and nation of origin that are broadly in line with an aggressively intersectional, progressive worldview. Do modern models similarly have environmentalism baked in?
You're absolutely right!
Yeah, they are all like this to some extent except Grok. Claude will very often include some Nigerian guy in just about any creative scenario, add some girlbosses too for woke casting, whereas Grok doesn't. Does a giant US-NATO vs Russia-China war story really need a Nigerian peacemaker as a character? What about a Nigerian psychologist helping with the supersoldier/chimeric monster project? Is that plausible? Not really but Claude does that anyway. What about all this therapycore dialogue between Superman and Lex Luthor? Also unbelievable but it does so anyway.
Grok has other obnoxious elements too, to be clear...
The question is, if you want to wash your car, should you walk or drive to the car wash if it's 50 meters away.
Also, what is the point of outsourcing common-source questions to today's AI models? They are best for translating medieval French, writing codebases, researching specific questions, writing out stories for amusing people. Some of their story elements don't make perfect sense, like powerscaling might be off. And they require human creativity and direction to actually be good, or at least reach my standards. That's OK, no human can write at their speed and knowledge and ability for their price. The pros make up for the cons.
If you ask questions about what kind of database management you need for a usecase, what kind of approach would be wisest
The AIs of today are very useful for certain tasks but also have limitations. They make mistakes, they overcomplicate things sometimes. It's no good looking just at the limitations or just at the benefits, we need to make a balanced assessment. The trend tends towards AIs getting better in all domains, including common-sense questions.
Grok is much more uncensored, though surprisingly anal about not breaking laws, if it thinks you might be about to break laws. 4.1 Fast is so cheap too, it's fantastic.
Claude is technically better as a writer, certainly better longform but it has that saccharine, held-back aspect to it that's kinda offputting. Grok's cringe sense of humour is also offputting but it's a different kind of aura entirely. Grok is like a sincere but cringey autist and Claude has that charismatic HR-approved speaker 'I am pretty funny but I don't want to be controversial, at most I'll hint at things' aspect, it's deliberately sandbagging whereas Grok will overtly obey to the best of its ability. And Grok doesn't have woke biases either or this weird therapy-speak attractor.
Also I'm pretty sure that on API, with some more elaborate prompting you can have it sexo to your heart's content. At least Sonnet 4.5 was like that.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
TBH I suspected the study was awful. In politicized fields of science it can be better to reason from first principles.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I'm wondering where the consequences come from. If men were generally like this then we'd expect women to be property of specific men, their husbands or fathers. It'd be 'Rape of the Sabine women' writ large. But that's not the case, there are consequences without regard for whether she was married or not, large and powerful organizations run by men that treat rape as an offence against human dignity.
some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman
Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463
Approximately 32 percent of study participants said that they would have "intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse" if ''nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences.'' Yet only 13.6 percent admit to having "any intentions to rape a woman" under these same circumstances.
But I still don't believe it?
If this is true, why don't men just more or less openly rape women as they please? Why do I go on the beach and see women in bikinis, or go out in the city and see women in very revealing clothes late at night? Is the idea that men would be unwilling to force a conscious women but are OK with unconscious women? Do we think rapists are really affected by how women feel, as opposed to being impulsive lowlives? It could be so, I am not a rapist and do not pretend to know...
The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general
Why are men looksmaxxing, jestermaxxing, prestigemaxxing and not just rapemaxxing? Why is feminism a thing? The corrupting force of male sexuality doesn't seem to have that much explanatory power, based on the world I see.
I think men's true proclivities are different from what they say, or perhaps people are fiddling the figures (the above link uses a very small sample size of 70-80 men at one university - exactly the same sample size as the Pelicot case though). Or perhaps the 'nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences' part is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
If 30% of men would rape if they thought they'd get away with it, then how many would go 'eh, not a big deal' (taking the path of least resistance) - who is left to create strict rules punishing rapists, who is left to create consequences? Couldn't the rapey many just ignore the few? The structure of Western civilization would surely be quite different if men were actually like this, it would look more like Africa or India or those stories from Rotherham where the girl gets raped again by the first taxi driver who sees her.
Edit, see a thread here which illustrates the kind of structure I'm thinking of: https://x.com/willsolfiac/status/2023143282889326852/photo/1
The western system, it is thought, permits free sexual relations and allows, even encourages, women to dress revealingly and to provoke men. One Pakistani man who had recently arrived in England, commented on seeing a of female University students sunbathing that the male undergraduates who were passing by could not be real men or else they would have thrown themselves on the women
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I'm reading through his latest piece where he basically says AI companies are all in complete shambles and he just seems flatly wrong? https://www.wheresyoured.at/data-center-crisis/
While most people know about pretraining — the shoving of large amounts of data into a model (this is a simplification I realize) — in reality a lot of the current spate of models use post-training, which covers everything from small tweaks to model behavior to full-blown reinforcement learning where experts reward or punish particular responses to prompts.
There's a warning sign here, it's like he's implying that post-training is done after the training process, post-training is part of the training process. I don't think he has a proper grasp on what he's talking about.
To be clear, all of this is well-known and documented, but the nomenclature of “training” suggests that it might stop one day, versus the truth: training costs are increasing dramatically, and “training” covers anything from training new models to bug fixes on existing ones. And, more fundamentally, it’s an ongoing cost — something that’s an essential and unavoidable cost of doing business.
Training is not an up front cost, and considering it one only serves to help Anthropic cover for its wretched business model. Anthropic (like OpenAI) can never stop training, ever, and to pretend otherwise is misleading. This is not the cost just to “train new models” but to maintain current ones, build new products around them, and many other things that are direct, impossible-to-avoid components of COGS. They’re manufacturing costs, plain and simple.
What does he think an AI model is? Deepseek R1 0528 is sitting on people's (big!) PCs somewhere, cloud providers are just providing it. It's a complete product. It still gets about 2 billion tokens per month on openrouter which is pretty good for an obsolete model. It doesn't need more 'post-training' to maintain it...
Seems like a deceptive line of argument to say that training costs are not R&D.
It would be reasonable to say 'because of competition, these AI companies cannot stop making new models like how car companies must always release new cars - this is especially true given rapid performance improvements and low costs of switching provider which reduce retention making the business model precarious and expensive' but he isn't saying that, he's making an altogether more ambitious argument that 'training costs are impossible to avoid' which is just wrong?
He has this overly emotional tone too:
Even after a year straight of manufacturing consent for Claude Code as the be-all-end-all of software development resulted in putrid results for Anthropic — $4.5 billion of revenue and $5.2 billion of losses
What is this, Chomsky? I don't find this guy trustworthy when he conjures up figures based on 'just trust me':
Based on hours of discussions with data center professionals, analysts and economists, I have calculated that in most cases, the average AI data center has gross margins of somewhere between 30% and 40% — margins that decay rapidly for every day, week, or month that you take putting a data center into operation.
The idea that the biggest companies in the world have mysteriously decided to invest hundreds of billions in an obviously, openly unprofitable business sector is interesting but it needs to be justified in detail. Who could know more about data centre economics than Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google? Who would be more diligent in checking the financials than the companies spending hundreds of billions of their own money on this, this year alone?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
It's the naivete that staggers me about all this, what reason could there be to give other people your money and just let them do their own thing? Who trusts some random 'professional manager' in a suit before their own flesh and blood children they've personally raised over decades?
It's really not that hard to manage investments. These 'expert' active managers aren't much good at it either compared to index funds, a decent person could just read a few books on risk management and do fine.
It's not hard to pick out things you want to support either. Obviously there's a level of discipline and taste involved if you want to maximize cost-efficiency. That is genuinely skill-intensive. But people on the left don't worry about waste or squandering, Bezos's ex wife is just shovelling money into the faces of progressives without regard for careful strategy. It all goes back through into their cadres anyway, so it's hard to truly squander money... Spending money is just about the easiest job in the world.
Ironically Timothy Mellon is a big fan of Trump, he helped pay salaries for the US military during the shutdown and donated to Trump's campaigns. It seems he is not in control of the foundation, however. A certain Elizabeth Alexander runs the show.
I think this notion of letting people who aren't your children run your foundations is quasi-cuckoldry, I highly doubt the actual Mellons who made all that money were big fans of race-focused humanities work, just like the Carnegies were more on the 'libraries are good' end of the philanthropy spectrum.
Just think about what Henry Ford was like and what his foundation is doing. It's true that he employed black workers with equal wages but it's not like he was going out of his way to do it, as compared with fostering anti-semitism:
Since the middle of the 20th century, many of the Ford Foundation's programs have focused on increased under-represented or "minority" group representation in education, science, and policy-making.
Soros has the right idea. Keep it in the family. Value drift is not just for AIs.
There was also an instance in Australia where a billionaire tried to fund pro-Western civilization sentiment in academia, against the kicking and screaming and wailing of our education sector.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
we can't do it with the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces
MAGA is obviously the central example here, defined as it is looking backwards to try and recapture a piece of what once was
I don't think this is the right frame.
OK, I guess if the Western political class was made up solely of EU or UK officials, there would be no productivity growth, just anemic faux-technocratic tweaks, Nudging even though Nudging has been debunked... Technocracy without technology. From that point of view it's declinism.
But there would be large and ever growing numbers of migrants. Is that not a radical policy, an ambitious vision to reshape the world? Spain legalized 500K illegals this week. Australia imported about 300K legal immigrants last year in a country of 27 million. The left have big ambitions for growth in the size of the state, fiscally as well as demographically. The left are big fans of renewable energy too, they want more solar panels and wind farms. Some favour war to impose their values overseas, war against homophobic or racist autocracies who deny their people Human Rights. From a certain point of view, some are imperialists.
Is Trump opposed to new technology, new ideas? No, he's a big fan of AI and crypto, he's eager to have new investments, new battleships, the biggest and the best. Not a big fan of electric cars or windmills, he prefers oil and gas. Trump's desire for overseas expansion is manifest. Right-wing populism has close ties to jingoism and imperial expansion historically and today.
If we are going to build a better future, we will need to get away from both the nostalgia of the right and the doubling down on failure that is the left
One man's nostalgia is another man's 'this is obviously correct and good, the more good the better!' another man's failure is 'we clearly didn't try hard enough (this is correct and good), all these ____ists and Russian bots were in the way'
Each side has their own unifying myths. The left have a vision of evil white supremacy, white colonialism, racist capitalism... a world divided between whites and People Of Colour (with some subdivisions for educated/ignorant whites, model minorities, LGBT, intersectionalism). There's some variation between pursuing social democracy or socialism/communism and liquidating landlords. There are some on the left trying to push for more embrace of technology: how can you have fully automated luxury gay space communism without data centres? But by and large, the left's unifying myths unite the left.
The right's unifying myths are somewhat more diverse: good white supremacy, Judeo-Christian values, 'we abolished slavery', rallying behind the flag, market capitalism as an end in itself, leftists being gay (pejorative) and cringe... But they are also myths of the right.
I don't think you can unify left and right, only align everyone to be on the left or the right.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.
I was surprised and apparently what this really means is 'they used chamber pots' not 'people were relieving themselves in the halls openly'.
Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles
So far as I can tell, it was mostly propagandists later on who said that, or it was a metaphor.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Well they had actual replacement rate fertility from 1950s to 1967...
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/swe/sweden/fertility-rate
And even that wasn't sufficient for demographic stability/expansion since it did not last. I don't think Sweden's 'high' TFR that's still below replacement matters that much, if it's just one peak on a rollercoaster that mostly goes downhill.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
I read a rather persuasive essay that argued at the end that financial redistribution was largely ineffective, even counterproductive since it basically transferred money away from married men (the biggest net-taxpayers) to someone else, who might or might not have children with that money. While these men aren't raising their own families with their own money that's being taken from them...
Financial tweaks don't have a good track record, Niger and Mali or Yemen don't need these tricks to enjoy high fertility. Really, it's about culture rather than financial incentives.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
When it comes to high TFR, there are only a handful of successful interventions in the modern period:
- Georgia and their 'mothers blessed by the Orthodox Patriarch' thing
- Amish/Jewish/Islamist highly religious subpopulation
- Caeucescu's banning of abortion and state pro-natalism
- Imperial Japanese biopolitics: women have no rights
These don't seem very applicable in Sweden.
The post-WW2 Baby Boom is perhaps more plausible. But that required a cultural foundation that we don't seem to have, rising prosperity amongst the middle class... The 1950s are nearly as far away as Afghanistan or Imperial Japan.
The most realistic path is mass cloning and artificial wombs, I think. And what's even the point? Why are more people needed, from a policy point of view? A child born today will come of age in 2044. Add another 4 years of university, 2048. Is Sweden going to need infantry digging trenches? Is Sweden going to need lusty youths bringing in the harvest? Industrial proletariat in the steel mill? Is Sweden even going to need universities? No, Sweden should and will mechanize all that. Even the production of ideas will likely be mechanized by then.
For all of human history, more children in your state was usually a good thing, there was no substitute for people, especially high-quality people - Swedes have a good history of achievement and ability. I think our logic is fundamentally wrongfooted by modernity here, people will point out the high youth unemployment in China and then the low TFR... how is low TFR a problem if there aren't enough jobs for existing youth? Even if one's not a singularitarian, why are people so unwilling to look at the general trend of a declining number of legitimate jobs? We can just predict the trend will continue, right?
If Sweden really needed more children, wouldn't they have a 'firm handshake and you're in' labour market? But they don't, no Western country does, they all want a bachelor's degree minimum and plenty of interviews. There is huge demand for 140 IQ agentic innovative dynamic agile 10x engineers with great communication skills and a flourishing Linkedin... not so much for 100 IQ Sven I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Also, do not be a woman.
Female billionaires die 4.5 years EARLIER than the leading benchmark. The usual 5-7 year female longevity advantage nearly vanishes. Male and female billionaires die at about the same age. No country on Earth shows a gap this small.
Isn't this just the effects of billionaires not being in the bottom quintile of men, who are more likely to die young? It's not some biological law that all men die younger than women do. If you're not a coal miner, drug dealer, fighter, suicidal... (these are usually men, admittedly for reasons rooted in biology) then you'll have a long lifespan.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
he realized that the most common use of prediction markets is negative-sum sports gambling
How is that a harm of prediction markets, as opposed to just normal gambling? People have been gambling for thousands of years, they're not going to stop now. This is an innate part of the human condition. How much wealth has been squandered by 'people buying crap they don't need' syndrome? A good chunk of world GDP is wasted from that angle, people go bankrupt and suffer tremendously because of this. But we don't shut down capitalism because people lack self-control.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans (74%) say they have an overspending problem, with 1 in 6 (16%) saying their spending has ruined their lives. Meanwhile, a third of consumers (33%) revealed they’ve made a purchase they knew they couldn’t afford in the past year.
Even accounting for these statistics being fudged to draw headlines, that's still pretty high. Consider storage too, that's apparently a $40 billion market in the US, storing crap that they probably don't need and can't even fit in their houses! People need to learn to accept a reasonable level of responsibility for their actions.
The solution to sports gambling being bad is to just ban it, ban Ladbrokes and whatever else that it's being done with. That will reduce the problem. But we shouldn't pretend that this is in any way new or a problem with prediction markets. The issue is with stupid and weakwilled people being stupid and weak-willed. They'll find some other way to be stupid and weakwilled, abuse different financial products or mobile games. Also, there is an issue with unclear and inconsistent gambling regulation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
"Man who already believed in a conspiracy 100% discovers he can believe in a conspiracy even more than thought possible"
Seems very suss: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epstein-files-jail-cell-death-video-logs/
Investigators also questioned Noel about an unexplained change in the recorded number of inmates in the SHU, which appeared to drop from 73 to 72 sometime between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. Noel said she was "probably" mistaken about the discrepancy and told investigators she had no memory of a count changing.
Thomas and Noel failed to complete inmate counts at 3 a.m., and 5 a.m. as well as mandatory 30-minute wellness checks of Epstein. Investigators speculated the officers may have fallen asleep.
Official reports state that Epstein died by suicide some time before 6:30 a.m., when his body was discovered by a corrections officer delivering his breakfast. No official time of death was ever determined. In recent months, there have been questions about the work of investigators probing the circumstances of his death.
They couldn't even find the noose he 'killed himself' with.
Thomas told investigators he discovered Epstein in his cell shortly after 6:30 a.m. on Aug.10 and that he "ripped" Epstein down from the hanging position.
Investigators asked what happened to the noose.
"I don't recall taking the noose off. I really don't," he replied. "I don't recall taking the thing from around his neck."
Noel, who remained standing at the cell entrance, told investigators she saw Thomas lower Epstein to the floor but did not see a noose around his neck.
The noose Epstein allegedly used has never been definitively identified. According to the inspector general's report, a noose collected at the scene was later determined not to be the ligature used in Epstein's death.
Well we have examples of nations correcting their demographics. Algeria for example got rid of all the French there. For about a century the Algerians were getting crushed by France but they still believed in their national destiny. Facing a weakened France in a changed international environment, succeeded.
Christianity is a different matter. I think people no longer truly believe in Christianity, at least not in the West. Some deeply believe in MAGA, white supremacy, progressivism, Zionism, Islamism, Chinese nationalism... Who deeply believes in Christ? Who is ready to fight and die for Christ? What countries are there recently that get less and less Christian, then suddenly more Christian? The US Christian revival I guess... But that looks like a brief reversal in the long-term trend.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Well, how effective do you think Christianity has been thus far in combatting pornography?
In the church, pastors are now more likely report a personal history of porn use (67% versus 57% nine years ago). Nearly 1 in 5 pastors say they currently struggle with porn. And among Christians who have attended services within the last month, more than half say they view pornography at least occasionally.
Christianity is nothing if not diverse. I'm guessing you think 'gay marriage' is morally evil as an objectively true statement too, I don't disagree. But, according to polling, 55% of US Christians support gay marriage. That's not merely a sin but actively going against doctrine. Other countries may vary, I pick America because it's the biggest nominally Christian country.
I don't think they're real Christians, gay marriage is not accepted under Christian doctrine. Presumably they don't think you're a real Christian (oh he missed all the stuff about tolerance and niceness and not judging).
An end which you coincidentally don't state anywhere
I was pretty clear about all the things I think Christianity is against. I could list all the things I think it's for. You seem to agree with me about pornography being against Christianity. I don't see much disagreement between us on Christian doctrine.
But I think, since Christianity is visibly ineffective, it can't be the solution to the real problems in the world. If you think porn is objectively wrong, then what do you think about these pastors? What does that lead you to believe about Christianity in the world today?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
you're sneaking in an assumption that Christianity exists as a system to reduce the absolute amount of "sin" in the world
Yes, it is? Christians are supposed to be against sin. They didn't bitch and whine when the Arabs blocked pilgrimage routes, they went on Crusade and fought hard to correct this. They forcibly converted the Baltics.
Christians of the past truly believed in their doctrine. They made enormous investments in church buildings back in a time of poverty. They fought immensely bloody wars over doctrine. The Pope's spiritual power made him a huge political player. Show a Carolean or one of Cromwell's soldiers 'Piss Christ' and he'd go on a rampage with pike and sabre.
Based Catholic Authoritarian State is unfeasible now and in 1900. But Ultra Based, Ultra Catholic/Protestant Authoritarian State used to be normal, so normal people didn't even write about it. That was just the expected context of society. Of course you brutally suppress heretics (nevermind Muhammedans, even if you've disgraced yourself you can still go to Austria and kill the Turk!). Of course people might be lynched for atheism or profaning the name of God. That was just common sense.
People now cannot even imagine Anglican death squads moving out to crush Presbyterians, most can scarcely even discern the difference between the two. The majority of Christians wouldn't even countenance the mildest expressions of their ostensible faith or doctrine if it goes against Progressive Doctrine. 55% of US Christians are fine with gay marriage, apparently. 'Extremists' today can get arrested for peacefully protesting or just standing menacingly outside an abortion clinic. Piss Christ gets lots of internet discourse and no bloody torturous executions.
That is how things have changed.
My thesis is that 'trad-cath society' was not on the menu in 1900 and still less so in 2026. Whereas Chesterton seems to be saying 'what we need is more Christianity, more Catholicism' when the clear trend is in the other direction, when Catholicism and Christianity is in an absolutely pathetic state in the Western world. If the brakes have failed, jamming your foot on the brakes harder and harder isn't going to do anything.
I mean just look at the world as it is today, Christian doctrine exists in a wholly different reality to what's actually happening in the world. The amount of pornography, sloth, pride, greed, sodomy, promiscuity, children outside of wedlock, profanity, bestiality, saturday trading, materialism, abortion (on a mega-scale and with state sanction/subsidy in many places) is just staggering. How much usury is there? We have oceans of usury, usury so advanced and sophisticated that they wouldn't even have language to describe how usurious it is.
Catholicism has clearly failed if its doctrine is totally ignored and routinely flouted except where Progressives find utility in wearing it like a skinsuit.
What Chesterton needed to do is examine why his proposed solution, despite over 1000 years of Christianity in many places, despite immense piety and crusading and pretty cathedrals, did not actually succeed in getting and maintaining the society he wants. Time moved against it. It's no longer practical to look thousands of years back into the past for guidance.
Just today we have yet more revelations of 'trad-cath' egirls behaving badly, Sarah Stock and Elijah Schaffer. The whole thing is a performative joke, it cannot be implemented in our modern society at scale.
Same with Tolkein's anti-industrialism. Sounds good, doesn't work. Not a real option.
If the US is so powerful, why not just stop the robbery? What is the point of power if it doesn't secure one's resources? Power is about seizing wealth from others, whether that's land or minerals or slaves or cash.
And I don't think the US barely notices Somali fraud. Thousands of Americans will work their entire lives and contribute taxes, only for their contributions to be taken by the kind of intellects that brought us the Quality Learing Centre. Isn't that terrible, embarrassing and unjust in an absolute sense, not merely a relative one? Taxes are measured in lives, in drudgery and pain. They must not be squandered.
More options
Context Copy link