RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Good points. In my mind I guess I conceptualize civilization as an accelerationist project that is going to end up reshaping or disassembling the world one way or another, so why bother with greenhouse gas emissions? We'll end up paving the Antarctic and Arctic with datacentres, heating the world with sheer mass of industry, turning wilderness into parkland... Like it or not we've subjugated nearly all land mammal biomass and we're moving in on the oceans. Why try to arrest the transformation now? It is our destiny...
If you've ever read the Keys to the Kingdom series, a major part of it is Arthur trying to preserve his humanity from the sorcerous power of the keys. He takes all these risks and limitations on his power, trying to stay mortal. But in the end he becomes a 12 foot tall winged immortal Denizen anyway, he is the Chosen One after all. The impulse to retain humanity in the face of general superiority always seemed strange to me, though I accept my opinion must be in the minority there and in ecology/climate too.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
It seems provocative and unnecessary though. Iran hasn't tested a nuke yet though who knows if they have some stashed away, nukes that could make there way back to the US one way or another, perhaps by truck. If Iran does develop nuclear capabilities that's bad news for Israel. But Iran has nuclear capabilities of some level, as does Pakistan. Yet nobody's nuked eachother. India and Pakistan fought many wars prior to acquiring nuclear weapons, now they don't fight much at all.
While a nuclear disarming strike can make sense for top-level world-domination affairs, why go to such an effort for Israel?
There are some less certain indications that W-76 nuclear warheads are also being moved to Diego Garcia
Really? Haven't heard anything about this. A nuclear disarming strike against a country of 80 million is a very, very bold move in an environment with multiple hostile great powers. I wouldn't think Trump has the balls for something so risky, no matter how many Zionists are jabbering in his ear.
Pick a fight with Canada
Demand Greenland
Impose tariffs on everyone
Attack Iran with a pre-emptive nuclear strike
Gigachad endorsed but probably not the wisest strategy, all things considered.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Been having a lot of fun with Mechabellum, it's an autobattler game where you put down your robots on the board, then they attack the nearest unit to them and lock on. This makes it very much a game of positioning and timing, you want the enemy heavy hitters targeting your little chaff robots, you want your snipers hitting their big hp single-entity bots.
There is a way to direct some units to advance in a specific path, this is great for drawing enemies out of position or beelining for the enemy towers.
Each round both players get access to 1 of 4 call-in abilities/unit sidegrades/drop-in units, so there are elaborate mind-games. Do you go after the opponent's Level 4 Mustangs with a missile? Or do you think he'll see that option and put a shield bubble over it, so you go after the Level 2 Mustang next to it? Do you anticipate he'll take Fortresses given your unit composition, so go Melting Point to forestall him?
Everything has a counter. If the other guy's going big on long-range snipers, you can get some Sandworms, melee bots that advance safely underground before popping up with chainsaws. Or longer-range artillery. Or a pack of small units. If he's focusing heavily on teching up his units, you can get EMP techs to undo them. You can even get photon coating upgrades on some units to counter EMP.
Also, the devs have done a good job consistently updating the game, adding new units and gamemodes for free. There's a wacky 4 player FFA mode, 2v2 so you can blame your teammate when you lose and classic 1v1. This all seems to be funded by cosmetic microtransactions.
Gripes:
Napalm heavy meta right now at high MMRs, too many bots have napalm/sticky oil bombs. This burns away all the low HP units and makes it a bit of an air-dominant game.
4 player FFA mode is a bit unbalanced and can wreck framerates
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Electrification is all well and good (clean air!) but why go to such a great effort in steel and cement? The capital base using coke/thermal coal is already there and paid for. There's 70-100 years of coke left, probably more if we look harder.
It just seems like an inefficient use of resources. Why would we even want to overbuild our electricity sector by 30% and have all this surplus/deficit in power? Just build more nuclear plants when we need more energy, keep them running 95% of the time and then switch over to fusion power. Keep using coke where needed, counter CO2 emissions with sulphate aerosols.
I guess it makes sense if the 'solar power is going to make energy insanely, ludicrously cheap' argument comes true. But they've been saying this for ages. It hasn't happened. We've been told that solar power is incredibly cheap, yet electricity prices have been rising even as we build more and more solar. I live in Australia. We're not short of solar potential! I think the whole narrative is an illusion. Actually cheap energy sources have high uptime and reliability - coal, gas, nuclear, hydro. I'm not aware of any major country whose electricity prices have fallen as a result of a transition to renewables.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Recycled steel can't be used in certain areas. If you want a gun barrel or a nuclear reactor or anything important and high-performance, you want virgin steel. It's a key capability for a major economy. A strong steel industry has flow on effects in construction, advanced engineering, munitions, shipbuilding, energy...
Every country protects its steel industry for a reason!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/27/british-steels-chinese-owners-reject-500m-go-green/
Jingye, the Chinese steel group that owns the plant, blamed Donald Trump as it announced plans to shut key operations, putting up to 2,700 jobs at risk.
British Steel has announced plans to close its two blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, making Britain the only G7 country unable to manufacture its own steel.
Jingye said it has invested more than £1.2bn to maintain operations since 2020 but said losses have ballooned to around £700,000 a day.
British Steel’s latest available accounts show pre-tax losses grew tenfold to more than £408m in 2022.
What a pathetic story of British-style governance in action. Sell the steel industry to China. Wreck the economy with ridiculously expensive 'clean energy'. Lose basic industrial capabilities for warmaking or building anything. Lose jobs. Lose relevance. Lose everything, sooner or later (sooner).
Development economics needs a new category to go along with developing and developed, studying declining countries like the UK.
Australia does basically the same thing, albeit with the extra steps of 'bail out the industries wrecked by gross economic negligence' and 'invest in green hydrogen': https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/20/whyalla-steelworks-government-bailout-administration-sa
Green hydrogen isn't even a thing, surely most physicists could tell you the concept is a fantasy. Who has ever dreamed of expensively converting electricity into hydrogen, struggling to store the ultra-leaky, diffuse, explosive gas and then turning the hydrogen back into electricity? Even in the fantasy-world of renewable energy economics it's an unusually silly dream. Nuclear power is still banned of course.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Feel like that deserves a trigger warning only semi-ironically. Aella and Richard Hanania in a cursed Western animation artstyle... What did we do to deserve this? Aella polarization-maxxing continues I guess.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
for the next 15-20 years
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.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d 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!
6d 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!
8d 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!
8d 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!
8d 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!
8d 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!
9d 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!
9d 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!
13d 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!
13d 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!
13d 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!
13d 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!
13d 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.
Just wanted to highlight the essays written by the Zero-K devs about RTS game design. Surprisingly thoughtful and interesting stuff:
https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes/11_-_The_Atomic_Solution_to_Monospam
https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes/16_-_Aim_and_Fire
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