RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13hr ago
My theory is that Taiwan needs a miracle to survive if the Chinese go in.
Before WW2, Japan had been planning for war with America for many years. The plan was to lure the US fleet out into Japanese waters, slowly eating away at them with submarines and land-based bomber attacks before a decisive battle where Japan would hold the upper hand. Then the US started building an absolutely gigantic fleet set for 1942, blocked Japanese oil imports and the Japanese realized they were doomed unless they got in a huge first strike, so they switched to the Pearl Harbour strategy. The initial Japanese execution was excellent but the US eventually overwhelmed them with tonnage and weight of numbers (plus some qualitative superiority too by the end).
Japan fixated around the wrong things. Why would the American fleet deploy to quickly reinforce the Philippines and accept these risks? Why would the US give up after one decisive battle? 'Who has the better battleship' wasn't that important to the outcome, it was mostly about size.
Nearly all discussion of a Taiwan war revolves around the amphibious campaign, measured in days and weeks. But wars between serious powers usually last for years. Ukraine has lasted for years, it's a war of attrition. We should think about attrition and mass rather than a single decisive battle.
Taiwan is uniquely vulnerable to attrition. It's an island with virtually no domestic energy production, no fertilizer production and maybe 20-30% food self-sufficiency. China may not be able to successfully invade. Amphibious campaigns are hard. But all they need to do is bomb Taiwanese ports to prevent resupply. Taiwan will be forced to capitulate. You can't run a country with no food and no power. China won't get the fabs (the US will blow them up if it looked likely) but they will get the island and the people. The island is an important base, it's important politically and the people are the real reason behind TSMC's success. And all China needs to do to win this slow victory is fire off enough missiles at Taiwan's ports to break through any defence, they need only to avoid complete US victory in Chinese home waters.
Considering China's gigantic industrial capacity, they should easily be capable of darkening the skies of East Asia with missiles and drones. They're the biggest shipbuilder in the world, the biggest producer of drones and test more missiles than anyone else. China has built up huge reserves of fuel and food, they start much closer to self-sufficiency and enjoy overland trade routes, they're far better prepared for blockade than Taiwan.
China would of course prefer a knockout victory where their marines raise the flag over Taipei, they would prefer not to need to impose rationing or conduct a large-scale industrial mobilization. But if a quick victory doesn't seem practical, like the US in 1941, they'll double down and rely on industrial mass to win. They'll do what Putin did but x20, due to their size. That's the scenario we need to avoid.
Palantir's recent ad where they show a bunch of drones blowing up a presumably Chinese fleet at the push of a button is the crux of the problem. The US and gang doesn't just need to do this, we need to do this and prevent it being done to a bunch of big, slow freighters: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1868633675190939839
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14hr ago
London is a big city, there's room for many experiences. But the Home Secretary got mugged in 2018. There are apparently 50,000 phone thefts a year, especially targeting tourists in the city of Westminster. That's way too many. Furthermore, regardless of how many crimes are happening, the police should be working hard to catch criminals as opposed. Law and order is a core duty for the state, it should not be outsourced.
I'd be happy to see them refocusing to crack down on sexual offences but they're starting from a very, very, very low baseline: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grooming-gangs-iicsa-racist-fears-b2007649.html
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Rigid and inflexible governance practices, worsened by a lack of competition. Consider the Seaban where the Ming relocated whole villages away from the sea to combat piracy. That's a bizarre thing to do, rulers usually like having trade. But the Ming were so strong they didn't care, they had no peer competitors and so little need to search for revenue. The consequences for this stupid crap didn't hit them immediately. The Qing didn't raise taxes for about a century or two because they wanted to be benevolent, so the footprint of the state was very light compared to Europe. The population ballooned and they had the same number of officials, it was a mess. Proto-industrialization was accelerated by the military-industrial complex, China wasn't usually under threat... They could afford to do all this suboptimal governance that would get them annexed if they were in Europe. In Europe, states had to search for qualitative military advantages in metallurgy and shipbuilding, they had to squeeze out as much tax revenue as they could from people. Europeans weren't interested in ritualized trade missions where they gave out more than they received to 'tributary states', they wanted profits. The Chinese state didn't care so much about profit, they assumed they were the richest and the best from the start.
China built a huge fleet and explored all around the Indian Ocean, terrifying all the natives. But they felt like there was no use for it, they had plenty of money already. And the steppe nomads were acting up again, so they scrapped it and refocused. They thought they were on top of the world, so resisted catch-up industrialization for some time in the 19th century on the basis that they already had everything they needed.
Many megadeaths later, the lesson sank in. Today they push out official party doctrine books about how important scientific and industrial development is, overcorrecting if anything: https://www.strategictranslation.org/articles/general-laws-of-the-rise-of-great-powers
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
As far as I can tell, clearance rates for burglaries in the UK are around 5%. If that's the case then crime is literally out of control, in that there's no credible police ability to punish traditional criminals, as opposed to political offenders. Even if they do go to prison, they might just get let out again due to overcrowding.
Since the ONS moved to Newport I understand they shed a lot of their most talented staff and their output has been suspect ever since. It may be that they're right and victimization did fall since the 1990s. Even so, getting away with property crime 19 times out of 20 is pretty bad. Private police spontaneously materializing to meet unfulfilled demand is pretty bad.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
There should be an 'every single time' but for people in Western countries involved in Russia discourse with these distinctly Eastern European names... Around Molinsky, watch your foreign policy?
I'm perfectly happy with fact-based criticism of people like Kisin but Destiny has the air of someone who sits around for an hour, seething, drafting and redrafting his adhominem to be as cutting as possible. So he calls Kisin of all people a Putin dickrider.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
In the West, pollution has been getting better not worse. So it can't be an apocalyptic threat.
Climate change also can't be an apocalyptic threat on any reasonable timescale either (as seen in the IPCC reports) but it's easier to pretend that it is because it's a 'bad, getting worse' situation.
I don't think most people look at climate change narratives from first principles either, we've had 30 years of increasingly intense media indoctrination and prestige-class opinion-forming. It's all but locked in. Many people see Bjorn Lomberg and immediately think 'debunked/denier/paid-off/Newscorp shill'... They don't want to change their minds and so they can find some reason not to. I don't like changing my mind either. The Aztecs didn't doubt that you had to sacrifice humans on the altars, that's just what you do.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I don't like Kisin, I had him muted on twitter but he is firmly pro-Ukraine: https://x.com/search?q=from%3AKonstantinKisin%20ukraine&src=typed_query
He even says he thinks it's too late and that they can't win, that the proxy war is a bad idea. At least that's the gist I get from in front of a paywall: https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/ukraine-and-the-age-of-cowards
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
If this is to be believed, Britain is basically Ancapistan where you have to pay for private police if you don't want to be robbed. But it's actually worse - you still have to pay taxes for a useless state. The police are too busy stealing lethal weapons like bike wheels and kitchen knives from law-abiding citizens. Or locking you up for harmful tweets.
https://unherd.com/2024/12/the-private-police-patrolling-london/
In 2018, the area suffered 65 break-ins, a criminal romp that nonetheless failed to stir the short arm of the law. Such an experience now marks suburban life in the capital, with the Met failing to solve a single crime in 160 residential areas of London over the last three years. “The police gave up on this area years ago,” one shrugging resident explains.
British businesses and residents will soon spend £10 billion on private security
Between low morale, a defunding of specialist units, and a generational loss of talent, to say nothing of a “Spanish Inquisition” culture that leaves officers now “afraid to arrest suspects”. A worrying focus on “low hanging fruit” around communication offences hardly helps either, bemoaned one serving officer, even as they lament leadership that wanted to “solve societal ills” instead of busting criminals.
Yet if these private efforts are successful on their own terms — My Local Bobby helped cut vehicle crime in Hadley Wood by 38% — communally financing can be tough, even humiliating, for those who can’t afford it. One man in Fulham describes how a neighbour, who chose not to pay for the road’s private security team, discovered that they were contractually obliged to stand by as his house was robbed.
Need a British version of the Ancap song but it's the grimdark anarcho-tyranny British version where nobody's having fun: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tBH05IowMCE
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Plus Elon poured blood, sweat and tears into his rocketry well before near-term AI looked likely. How could he think about it rationally, SpaceX is his baby! It's got X in its name.
Even if the purest rational move is to go all in on AI and drop the Mars mission, he's already invested so much into the latter it's too hard to give up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
But the logic does hold. If you're an atheist materialist, why don't you believe that we are in a simulation? That's a perfectly materialist conclusion based on principles we can observe. Bostrom's a pretty smart guy.
Deep down Christians know that their prayers aren't being answered, they can tell that prayer alone won't get them what they want and produce all this cope about how you should be praying to be a better person rather than any concrete outcome. Nor are they using telescopes to look for heaven, somehow they know they won't find it. Still they find some reassurance in the rehashed schizo-prophecies surrounding a 2000-year dead Jew and hope that some day, their prophecies might be resolved and good things will happen. After they die good things they hope good things will happen. And singing hymns is fun.
Well, simulationists can also hope that good things might happen. We might die and wake up from this dream as transcendent, posthuman beings. It's not a hard kind of knowledge, we could be NPCs and be deleted. But there is more weight behind this abstract hope than in theirs, for a certain kind of rational person.
I just don't see how this is an acceptable tone for a public figure: https://x.com/TheOmniLiberal/status/1812575564093370795
Just go through the quote tweet chain, it starts with Destiny going 'A person in a crowd cheering for and supporting a traitor to this country caught a stray? I’m so sad, please.'
Kisin is openly pro-Ukraine anyway, it's shameless and perverse to say these things about him. Destiny is a despicable, disgusting individual.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Yes but why is that? I never bothered counting calories or exercising any restraint. My willpower is pretty low, all things considered. I barely do much exercise, I guess I walk longer distances than most people but that's about it, I don't go to a gym or anything. I occasionally do some bodyweight exercises, I can do sixty pushups but that's probably mostly because I'm thin. It takes only a few minutes each day for a few months to get to that level and I plateaued since.
My BMI is 20. Australia is a pretty fat country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Australia
I can only assume that a diet of fruit, good bread, milk and whole foods is superior to a diet of largely processed foods. I have chips and icecream sometimes, I'm not a puritan about these things.
This sounds like humblebragging and I guess it technically is but I think there must be something that can be learnt. Back in the 1960s everyone was like me. They could eat whatever they liked, drink a lot of alcohol and still not get fat like we see today. They were working desk jobs too! They just got sated. I get sated. When I eat a big dinner, I might not feel any need to eat even in the next morning, it doesn't cross my mind. I barely ever feel hungry.
I just don't see how I can be a genetic freak when this is how everyone used to live.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Hmm, well, I guess I consider this good counter-evidence against my theory.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I believe that most American food, even seemingly normal food, is full of weird chemicals.
Brown bread with seeds that goes stale in a few days is better than the kind of cheaper, longer-lasting white bread. Why is white bread so much cheaper and longer-lasting? Because it's full of strange ingredients. I don't know what kind of bread you're getting of course but just look at what Walmart puts in theirs. This was the first American bread that came up in my search: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-White-Round-Top-Bread-20-oz/10315355?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1200
Enriched Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Sugar, Yeast, Soybean Oil, Salt, Vital Wheat Gluten, Dough Conditioners (Mono- & Diglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Ascorbic Acid), Calcium Propionate (to Retain Freshness), Soy Flour, Encapsulated Sorbic Acid (Sorbic Acid, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Mono- and Diglycerides) (to Retain Freshness), Yeast Nutrients (Calcium Sulfate, Ammonium Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Soy Lecithin.
Likewise, there's cheese and there's cheese. Cheese can be minimally processed or intensively processed.
Some common ultra-processed products are carbonated soft drinks; sweet, fatty or salty packaged snacks; candies (confectionery); mass produced packaged breads and buns, cookies (biscuits), pastries, cakes and cake mixes; margarine and other spreads; sweetened breakfast ‘cereals’ and fruit yoghurt and ‘energy’ drinks; pre-prepared meat, cheese, pasta and pizza dishes; poultry and fish ‘nuggets’ and ‘sticks’; sausages, burgers, hot dogs and other reconstituted meat products; powdered and packaged ‘instant’ soups, noodles and desserts; baby formula; and many other types of product. See table 1, below
Industrial breads made only from wheat flour, water, salt and yeast are processed foods, while those whose lists of ingredients also include emulsifiers or colours are ultra-processed. Plain steel-cut oats, plain corn flakes and shredded wheat are minimally processed foods, while the same foods are processed when they also contain sugar, and ultra-processed if they also contain flavours or colours.
It all depends in what's in those corn tortilla chips. I reckon it would be processed, even ultra-processed depending on ingredients.
Based on the search results, here are the ingredients commonly used to make corn tortillas in the USA:
Masa Harina: A type of corn flour made from nixtamalized corn, which is dried and ground into a fine powder. Brands like Masienda, Maseca, and Bob’s Red Mill are popular choices. Water: Warm water is used to rehydrate the masa harina and “bloom” its flavor. Salt (optional): Some recipes include salt to bring out the flavor of the corn. Some store-bought corn tortilla brands in the USA may also include additional ingredients, such as:
Cellulose Gum: A thickening agent used to improve texture and shelf life. Guar Gum: A thickening agent used to enhance texture and prevent drying out. Amylase: An enzyme used to break down starches and improve texture. Propionic Acid: A preservative used to extend shelf life. Benzoic Acid: A preservative used to prevent spoilage. Phosphoric Acid: A preservative used to maintain freshness.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
I'm not convinced that people even need to put down the fork. I can eat as much as I want and exercise very little but remain thin. Mostly I don't eat ultra-processed food, I just eat whole food.
Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology (hence ‘ultra-processed’). Processes used to make ultra-processed foods include the fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical modifications of these substances, assembly of unmodified and modified food substances using industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; use of additives at various stages of manufacture whose functions include making the final product palatable or hyper-palatable; and sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and other synthetic materials. Ingredients include sugar, oils or fats, or salt, generally in combination, and substances that are sources of energy and nutrients that are of no or rare culinary use such as high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or interesterified oils, and protein isolates; classes of additives whose function is to make the final product palatable or more appealing such as flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling, and glazing agents; and additives that prolong product duration, protect original properties or prevent proliferation of microorganisms.
Doesn't sound very appetizing! But it obviously is, ultra-processed food is 60% of US calorie consumption: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ultra-processed-foods-calories-american-diet/
It seems very reasonable that eating things full of strange chemicals causes unusual health problems. Circus freaks from 1900 have nothing on the physiques you can see waddling around these days, they wouldn't even make it onto my 600 pound life. And the US is exporting this all around the world.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
A healthcare system is a system that produces health. If we were talking about the US Baby Boomer Maximization System, or the Senescence Sustainment program then it would be appropriate to consider life expectancy for sixty year olds primarily.
But for health, we should be considering lifespan for everyone. We should also be considering obesity and fitness, whether there's lots of chronic pain, drug addiction, mental illness and so on. Sustaining morbidly obese people in hospital with vast feats of medical engineering is not really what healthcare should mean.
Cherrypicking where the US does best doesn't justify all the areas where it does poorly. Why are so many people on anti-depressants? Why are so many fat or addicted to drugs? Failings of the US health system are root causes for both (bad nutrition advice and improper dietary additives +opiate mass marketing). Being shot can hurt your health just as much as a tumour and while generally police and troops are supposed to deal with that side of healthcare, they clearly aren't doing a great job of it in America. These problems are not solely caused by a bad health system of course, it's massively multicausal and there are other root causes.
I could even buy that US governance institutions are too inadequate to improve health without causing more damage than they fix, so it's best to keep on plugging away and hope for a technical fix. Or redirect energy to reforming governance first.
But defending the strengths of this system shouldn't silence the critics of its weaknesses. I agree that there is a lot of money and technology in the US medical system. They have lots of MRI machines per head. But what is the purpose of all those things if there are cheaper ways of producing more health?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Art is defined by being an act whose principal purpose is creative expression of the creator
Have you ever played a video game in your life? This is a serious question. If you have, then you would know that video games usually require the player to go through a linear series of challenges as designed by their creator. The creator controls the music, the art, they create the environment for the strategic and tactical choices of the player, they write out scripts and behaviours and scripted events. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure game but with more latitude. The creator has huge control over the creative expression their audience perceives. There are such things as horror games. There are such concepts as atmosphere and level design. Storytelling has been incorporated in video games for some years now!
Either you have not played video games, or you do not understand them at any significant depth.
And even in the more freeform games like minecraft, why does giving the audience more opportunities to do their own thing render it not artistic? Why have you arrived at this definition? Did you even know that this was the reasoning Ebert gave when he said that video games weren't art before I brought it up? I see no shadow of it in your earlier post.
It would be trivial to argue that because video games grant a higher and more expansive level of creator-audience interaction than lesser mediums like prose or sculpture, that they are a higher form of art, encompassing and surpassing all other mediums.
I also find it rather bizarre that you introduce selling pork chops at the supermarket - something that is clearly not a medium in the sense that I meant it. Any reasonable person would not consider selling pork chops at the supermarket to be a medium. A non sequitur indeed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
If you want you can try Bostromian Simulation Argument big-tent syncretism: 'your God is a shadow of the Supreme Being, the true creator of our universe'. It's not really a religion, since it has no significant moral teachings. But it does bring a lot of intellectual firepower to the Deist side of things.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Doesn't this strike you as bizarre?
Forget about the whore - Kony embraces God and he's alright? The thug who murders someone's whole family sincerely converts and is forgiven - but the victim goes to hell because she can't let go of her hatred for this bastard?
Real justice systems don't work this way, there is no unlimited forgiveness and for very good reason. I feel confident that the vast majority of Christians in history did not truly believe this, their threshold for unforgivable sinning was much lower.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
I think this is an actual Chainlink use-case. They're all over smart contracts.
The hard part is getting oracles to verify the information but that's what Chainlink is for. I'm not an expert in this area, most of the technical stuff goes over my head. But people are certainly trying!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Maximizing shareholder value is not the sole goal humanity should have. This is strawman paperclip maximizer talk.
Do you want Big Drug CEOs working hard to medicalize normal human experience and sell expensive and unreliable anti-depressants? Do you want yet more chemicals nobody's ever heard of in food to make it slightly cheaper? Should Lockheed Martin lobby for a more hawkish than strictly necessary foreign policy stance? Should Microsoft put yet more spyware in our PCs and sell our data?
I hold Lockheed Martin and Microsoft shares because I've got a certain model of how the world works. But it is not necessarily good when the green line goes up!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
South America isn't even that rich, so much of it is worthless jungle full of terrible creatures that eat you alive. They do have a lot of metallic minerals. But the US alone probably started off with more fossil fuels than all of South America combined, American resources are staggering.
Much of it's probably been drilled up by now but still, the US is the biggest oil and gas producer right now... Americans are far too eager to credit their institutions as opposed to their massive resource wealth, river networks, sea access, fertile soil and (most importantly) high performing demographics. Many have tried to copy US institutions and found it unhelpful, it's like rich people humblebragging about how they worked so hard. Hard work is some of the answer but it is not the most important thing, compared to working smart, being in the right place at the right time...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
How can anyone say an entire medium isn't 'art'? There's no agreed definition for art, just feelings and status. After decades of 'modern art' visually indistinguishable from detritus it's far too late for these pretentious critics to start battening down the hatches and enforcing rigorous standards.
A. Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.
I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.
But Ebert can't even do that, he can't even define what he's talking about. There is no reason given why player choice prevents art (and there are many games without player choice). There is no substance in his argument, just a vague assertion that it's unworthy of comparison with the great dramatists. Nor does he even know much about video games:
Ebert maintained his position in 2010, but conceded that he should not have expressed this skepticism without being more familiar with the actual experience of playing them. He admitted that he barely played video games
The problem is that they get blame that ought to go to the medical system generally.
Why is heterosexual Bill paying for homosexual Joe's PREP? Why is thin Larry paying for fat Pete? It's another instance of the social contract meme: https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1858551504073834615
What scenario are you thinking of? US bombers attack Chinese missile launchers (assuming they're conventional) but they're actually nuclear/dual-purpose and it's interpreted as a disarming strike? Incredibly brave US submarine somehow infiltrates the sea of Bohai and sinks a Chinese missile sub, prompting worries about the stability of their arsenal? China wouldn't start such a big war unless they think they have a secure nuclear arsenal. The US nuclear arsenal is very secure.
And neither side has deployed many tactical nukes, unlike in the Cold War. Modern smart weapons are very potent and forces tend to be dispersed, the value of tactical nukes is not as high as it used to be.
And it doesn't seem wise for either party to escalate consciously, why would they? If they suffer a reverse, wait and try again. If China is losing, they'll probably try to extend/expand the war and their mobilization rather than go nuclear. They don't particularly want to irradiate and incinerate their own rogue province.
Does the US care that much about Taiwan? They won't even make an explicit security guarantee for Taiwan, let alone extend their nuclear umbrella so far.
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