VoiceOfLogic
I happen to be, unfortunately, the first human super-intelligence.
What a sad tragedy to see what others can't see.
User ID: 1999
Great topic, I am very much into YouTube channels with unique proposition values, one that is remarkably great is https://youtube.com/watch?v=pDW4IYVlbbw
I am also in sapiosexual love with Vihart, the mathemusician, possibly the most brilliant woman on youtube, if not on earth
Throughout the decade I have been able to find the ultimate artists though, such as the unique masterpiece that is Umami's Interface
https://youtube.com/watch?v=b_V-VJQT6pM
And the vocally unique: The Minute Hour
Thanks Cafe, that is a great comment, exactly the kind of informatively rich comments the motte desperately lacks.
I will give you a proper answer tomorrow but when I said that tryptophan cross the BBB, I actually meant about 5 hydroxy tryptophan (5htp), which has good bioavailability, cross the BBB and bypass the rate limiting enzyme conversion of L-tryptophan to 5htp (which itself downstream will again be converted to serotonin in a rate limited manner)
1998:
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
I'm not familiar with the U.S, is affirmative action (ethinicity aside) a misandrist law that apply only for women and not for men for places where men are underepresented or worses, for places where a previous asymmetry is reversed and men become underrepresented? (see the catastrophic number of men failing or rejecting education in the U.S, IIRC there are twice as much women or something close?)
Sweden had a gender neutral non-degenerate law (although only focused on places where women were underepresented), the result? Since women now completely dominate the sweden scores they have removed the law since it helped to slow the continuous educational regress of the other half of humans, men (which are now largely underepresented in sweden education IIRC).
IMHO the suicide gender gap (300-400%) will continue to increase and the number of men transitioning to become women will also keep increasing fast despite its barrier to entry.
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
If true this probably imply that concerned ethnic minorities are more likely to responds more potently to nootropics such as e.g. cholinergics. A result I have not yet found through serendipity search, IMO I can't even answer wether women benefit more from nootropics (except for testosterone) but at least it is vastly known people with lower IQ in general, (even more so if specific condition such as fragile X syndrome) and non-young people are much higher responders.
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
I find the health aspects of radiations through induction charging worrying in principle, I have no idea how the potency compare to WIFI/5G radiation though but I would'nt risk it without studying the topic, it is absolutely not reasonable to trust our broken civilization on health topics, especially hypothetical oxidative and mutagenic long term only observable accelerated ageing.
If anything, the motte has a deficit in comments, most especially a deficit in comments answering a parent comment.
See my post history for yourself, I write well argumented, semantically very rich content/micro-essays especially but not only on (ineptly) polarizing topics and to me it is clear the semantic value I add to the motte is unparalleled, yet the level of engagement I receive, be it intellectually curious questions or constructive additional facts or argumentations, is very low, low in quality but most importantly low in numbers. Most of my comments are IMO remarkably interesting and information rich for the internet and yet people don't seem to react to that nor seem to appreciate that unique proposition value in the semantic space. So feel free to indulge some comments on mines.
see e.g. https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/56897?context=8#context
phytochemicals are extremely interesting actually and a surprisingly high number of synthetic drugs are derivatives or imitations of phytos or endogenous molecules.
People use to joke/ridiculize them but there is nothing more ridicule than a human that ridiculize billion of years parallel bidirectional (both the molecule and the body adapt) optimization of phamacological pathways towards maximizing host or symbionts survival or other advantageous metrics.
The issue with phyto (some can be toxic btw) is that many have bad bioavailability and sometimes suboptimal pharmacokinetics or half-lives.
Both of those problems can be trivially solved, either by bypassing first pass metabolism via vitamin C and or increasing lipophilia absorption via co-administration of omega-3 and or via inhibiting the CYP 450 enzymes via e.g. piperine or grappefruit juice (beware can be dangerous with many synthetic drugs as it potentiate wildly their metabolism hence dose potency, profile and half lives)
I'm not certain to understand what your goal is with that question,
a pharmacological causative model is heuristically useful to make predictions, about effectiveness for condition X and to establish a safety, tolerance, toxicity and interaction profile.
All those things are useful but mostly unecessary for the layman.
If there is a non-negligible community that takes plant X since years in quantity Y and that doesn't report huge terrifying side effects and that they report potent effectiveness then its probably worth a try for acute use although for long term use there will always be a toxicity/accelerated ageing question but in many cases we never know for certain however in most cases we do know reasonably somewhat the safety profiles.
It has actually become very rare to find phytochemicals that have not been extensively studied regarding their pharmacology and hence the causative model is often well established assuming you take time to research the research.
But beyond annecdtotal evidence, doing a blind test scientific trial about wether X is effective for Y, e.g. depression is very cheap and therefore even without said causative model we often know wether X has elicited a potent response for Y in N people empirically following precise protocol.
Empiricisms as always trumps a priori reasoning regarding effort efficiency and indeed people should considering the mostly safe profile of phytochemicals (generalization see e.g. cyclopamide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopamine#/media/File:Cyclopelamb2.jpg) play much more the lab rats, this would drive very significantly the speed of empirical scientific research and therefore discovery of treatments for ineptly considered incurable diseases.
edit:
only recently did we learn that tryptophan will selectively unbind with albumin at the blood brain barrier
What does that imply? We already knew tryptophan cross the BBB. You mean the competition with tyrosine?
only recently has the consensus shifted to serotonin deficiency lacking a role in depression (although I have my own views on this).
What?
Serotonergics are euphorisant see e.g. MDMA, MDAI, 5MAPB, shrooms, etc
The effect of SSRIs is less intuitive (reduction of sert receptors density) but still sert driven.
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
IQ is positively correlated with virtually every social metric there is.
I midly agree a-priori although too high intelligence can make someone incompatible with others (see inferential distance) and make someones become too serious, I believe hyperintellectualism reduce abilities to produce humor/jokes.
But isn't the common belief that very high IQ people are contingently but empirically correlated with cognitive disorders such as e.g the autism/asperger spectrum?
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
what do you mean by driving extinction..
Are you against the Flynn effect?
People nowadays have significantly higher IQs than past generious simply out of better acess to food and education.
past generations are being replaced and yet mankind is still dumb as a brick.
without talking about genetics or epigenetics, many people take nootropics that are cheap and mostly have benign or non existent side effects.
for example CDP-choline or racetams.
people that eat many eggs have transiently significantly better memory abilities than the ones that do not.
nicotine is a very potent nootropic agent, etc
Instead of virtue signaling about non-existent problems (the narrative than a newer generation of geniuses would make you appear subhuman is unrealistic, I consider myself to have considerably higher intelligence than my friends and yet we can still be friends and I respect them more than I respect my own self), you should try taking benign nootropics like low dose (200mg) CDP-choline daily it will midly improve your memory recall abilities and most importantly will slow down the ageing of your brain (via e.g. increased myelin production)
APS surely are an interesting topic:
The U.S does not yet seems to have a soft kill APS in production but Russia uses the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtora-1 on T-80 and (all?) T-90s
According to the manufacturers, Shtora decreases the chances of a tank being hit by an anti-tank missile, such as the Dragon, by a factor of 4–5:1.[10]
While russia has in addition 3 generations of hard kill APS, the U.S has 2 independent proof of concept models
first APS in history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drozd
Although reported to offer an 80% increase in survival rate during its testing in Afghanistan, the radar was unable to adequately detect threats and the firing of its rockets caused unacceptably high levels of collateral damage.[1]
later succeded with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_(countermeasure)
The computer has a reaction time of 0.05 seconds and protects the tank over a 300-degree arc, everywhere but the rear side of the turret. The system engages targets within 50 metres (55 yd) of the vehicle it is defending, and the ammunition detonates at around 1.5 metres (1.6 yd) from the threat.[10] It will engage any threat approaching the tank between the velocities of 70 metres per second (230 ft/s) and 700 metres per second (2,300 ft/s), and can detect false targets, such as outgoing projectiles, birds and small caliber bullets.[11] Arena works during the day and night, and the lack of electromagnetic interference allows the system to be used by multiple vehicles as a team.[23] The 27-volt system requires approximately one kilowatt of power, and weighs around 1,100 kilograms (2,400 lb).[11] Arena increases a tank's probability of surviving a rocket-propelled grenade by between 1.5[11]–2 times.[24]
Despite being very interesting, It seems this system is not in use but is available for export versions
Last gen deployed on Armata vehicles:
Afganit (Russian: Афганит, lit. 'Afghanite') is a Russian active protection system (APS) employed on modern Russian Armata family of vehicles.[1] It is intended to supersede the Arena APS and utilises radar and electro-optical sensors in the ultraviolet and infrared bands.[2][3] The millimeter-wavelength radar detects and tracks incoming anti-tank munitions. The system can reportedly intercept armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot kinetic energy penetrators in addition to high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) munitions.[4][5] Currently, the maximum speed that can be intercepted is 1,700 m/s (Mach 5.0), with projected future increases of up to 3,000 m/s (Mach 8.8).[6] According to news sources, it protects the tank from all sides.[7][8]
A few armata (not the T-14) have been seen in Ukraine but not meaningfully deployed yet.
Interestingly Ukraine has its own APS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaslin_Active_Protection_System however I have no clue how much it is used in practice?
About the US prototype APS:
n 2006–2007, the Institute for Defense Analysis found Quick Kill to be relatively immature and had significant development risks. Important components such as the radar were not yet fully developed and testing of the system as a whole was on hold while the warhead was redesigned. They also found Trophy, which uses a shotgun-like kill mechanism, to be the most mature of the 15 systems they analyzed.
while the other one seems promising:
However, in August 2018 the Army decided not to continue qualifying Iron Curtain onto the Stryker, saying that while the system "generally worked in concept" and was "generally able to hit its targets," it was still not mature enough.[11]
China recently deployed the GL-5 which has a range of 100 meters, twice that of arena (no clue for afganit)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GL5_Active_Protection_System
innovative since it launch 2 rockets.
The irsaely trophy seems interesting. Gun based.
almost completely negate legacy ATGMs unless paired with a sophisticated jamming attack ..
This is an unrealistic claim as of yet.
Firstly as we can see, at least for Russia and the U.S, hard kill APS are nothing more than uncertain and possibly buggy proof of concepts.
Russia did deploy some successfully in afghanistan but the fact they didn't deploy them shows that the tech is mostly not ready.
It could be that the new APS system on armatas is disruptives and working well, but that is unproven. It's possible but uncertain that using recent machine learning techniques would yield lower danger/false positives but given the classical inertia, if that were the answer, we're not ready to see that deployed until 20 years, and even so ML techniques have generally dangerous error rates.
It would be interesting to evaluate how much deployed in the wild are the ukrainian and chinese and israeli APS systems are though.
and what about hard kill APS for aircrafts/helicos?
As for soft kill APS, well russia is the only to have one widely deployed but Ukraine still manage to destroy T-90s just fine.
beyond the real world production ready-ness/falsepositives issues/safety of hard kill APS, what the manufacturer says is not necessarily objective truth
about the range, the claimed 360 degree coverage, reaction time, etc
especially I suspect many APS are weak and possibly useless against top-down attacking ATGMS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_protection_system#Top_attack_munitions
Overall I am very curious about the future of this technology and we might get answers either by:
studying academic papers/experiments about them
waiting for a china-taiwan war (unlikely)
waiting for a new israel based war (no idea)
waiting for the ukrainian APS system to be deployed or for western countries giving APS to ukraine (e.g. germany supposedly has one)
waiting for the armata systems to see some action in Ukraine, most likely but only if the war last a few years.
But your initial point is wrong, ATGMs have currently and probably for the foreasable future, destroyed tanks economics.
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
You might be interested to read my analysis regarding optimal military hardware composition https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/56897?context=8#context
So 5x and 2.4x. Which, while not as crazy as multiple of the typical orders of magnitude is still a pretty extreme military advantage.
Right it's not multiple order of magnitudes per se currently, but semantically they are not on the same scale which is my point.
However the multiple order of magnitudes could already be true through attrition,
if we suppose for example that Ukraine has lost 2000 tanks and still has 500, and make no asymetric assumption and therefore suppose ukraine ha lost 2000 tanks and therefore still has 10,500,
10500 / 500 == 21X so one order of magnitude of difference
now the attrition continues 1 year later,
10100 / 100 == 101X, 2 order of magnitudes, see the argument?
still a pretty extreme military advantage
adds to that, that russian tanks are more moderns than the Ukraine ones
and that on frozen fronts like bakhmut or all of the last months, the offender has a major attrition advantage supposedly since Russia has 100X more artillery (let alone precision missiles, and drone superiority)
off topic but I find it kinda weird they didn't manage to make Ukraine army totally incapacited by banning their access to GLONAS.
People also fail to realize that Ukraine has better military hardware than France, UK and germany quality wise.
But quantity wise the difference is beyond crazy, the ignorance of the layman is so strong, France has 200 tanks, UK has 300 tanks
Tank wise, Ukraine could have invaded France and UK 10 times each. 10 France
Ukraine has possibly the best anti-air on earth, etc..
Finally someone on a tribe topic that can answer one of my comments through curiosity and truth-seeking driven questions rather than baseless denial and non-constructiveness.
peak maximally useful military machines are generally from the 70s + a few cheap modernisations on top such as a 1 dollar gps/glonas chip
Are you actually serious about this? Or is it some joke?
I am very serious about this, I have studied most of the Soviet hardware that exists.
Or is it "effectiveness over resources, assuming that soldiers and their training costs nothing"?
? I did not factor training costs much in my analysis but that's not the salient part and anyway training costs and training time (incapaciting inertia) have allegedly massively got up with modern (90s+) hardware especially ineptly for the F-35 and for the Abrams (22 weeks for a tank! although most of it is probably actually unecessary).
The russians tanks brought autoloaders which reduce by 1/5 the number of soldiers needed to operate them but that is only a marginal optimization.
effectiveness over resources
Yes as you've seen I am mentioning economics but not only.
Are you claiming that it applies to such types of military machines as planes, satellites, night vision, AWACS, drones and communication gear?
It applies mostly for the main two salient categories, aircrafts and tanks.
satellites, night vision, AWACS, drones and communication gear
Of course not but those are cheaps and have all mostly plateaued regarding metrics. About AWACS/radars there are still advances needed towards exploiting anti-stealth loopholes but that is a "niche" topic.
For what your claim applies? Definitely not for static machine guns (here peak is earlier), maybe for standard issue riffles. Anything else?
static machine guns
well considering Ukraine is successfully using the Maxim gun from 1884, that can be a valid point.
Little known fact is that USSR has superior machine guns because of a trivial technology, they are propelled by gaz instead of electric cable, that imply that they are transportable instead of fixed, but the main usefulness is that they start to spin and are ready to fire faster. However as with most modern weapons (my salient point) that is only a very marginal optimization that supposedly does'nt make much of a difference.
maybe for standard issue riffles
yes
So about tanks:
The T-72-B3 (from the 70s) are great tanks with an effective shielding, an autoloader which abrams lacks and a larger gun than the abrams too. BTW kinda ridiculous that Abrams lacks explosive reactive armor, which modernized T-72 are getting. However the competition on shielding and gun size has become mostly useless for most purposes, it is trivial to understand that the shielding coverage of a tank only cover specific parts, especially: the gun has zero protection, the turret is a weak point and a tank is useless without a working continuous track. Even on the parts covered with large shielding, it is generally ineffective against an ATGM.
Therefore gun and shielding have reached extreme diminishing returns. However a T-72 cost 5 to 10 times less than a T-90M/Abrams.
That makes T-72 extremely superiors to modern tanks as with the same money and closely comparable effectiveness/survivability (low in both cases) and I can assure you 10000 T-72B3 would destroy 1000 Abrams/T-90M both psychologically and effectively.
It is essential to understand that because the U.S and to a lesser but significant extent Russia fails to realize the plateauing and the non-linearity of economic costs, those countries are actively becoming weaker and weaker militarily.
The T-14 armata is a clever optimization (unmaned turret but with less shielding...) but is probably less effective than a T-90-M if I understand correctly, as while it improves humans survivability, it lowers the tank survivability, which is inept.
About anti-air:
By far the most important anti-air hardware is the S-300 (IIRC the partiots are largely inferior) from the end of the 70s. The S-400 is simply not cost effective and therefore mostly a failure.
about aircrafts:
The same goes on and even more potently,
The SU-25/27 (70s) cost approximately 10 times less than the F-35 while having 2 to 3 times larger payload and almost twice faster max speed. Of course the F-35 is stealth but with its prohibitive cost, stealth paint maintenance, very small payload, probably doable stealth loopholes (SU 27 have IRST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_search_and_track, SU-35 have L bands radars, etc.. or simply optics)
The SU-75 is an interesting development regarding costs but still very high https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-75_Checkmate
The F-35 even has a x band signature, with some machine learning/hardcoded recognition software, given its static structure, I'd bet even without said loophole it is very much doable to make its stealthless useless. Besides, it becomes detectable as soon as it deploy its weapons.
But the best way to take down a F-35 would be to deploy 1 0 0 0 0 0 loitering drones at 1000 dollars piece, after all that's exactly the cost of an F-35 and they are as much optically visible and loud as your regular aircraft.
For those reasons investing in a large army of SU-25/27 is much less risky than a few F-35 with probably soon to be broken stealthness, however given the extreme sucess of S-300 and other SOTA anti-air, one should be lucid and understand that the SU-25/27 are also obsolete and that we should mostly return to extremely cheap turboprop WW-2 style aircrafts.
Such planes can be made to have modern variants optimized for cost at aproximately between 0.1 to 1 million dollars, therefore costing less than the modern anti air missiles and having increased maneuvrability/reusable weapons vs drones.
Both drones and those planes very ironically are said to be stealth for X-rays, as they can fly low, fly "slowly" and are more stealth than F-35 X ray only stealth, as they have smaller hitboxes and low thermal signature (against ISRT). The same way birds are actually stealth.
Thus they could ironically have increased survivability against S-300 and ATGMs vs the SU-25/27, but most importantly they are so cheap they can be replenished quickly and do psychological and tactical swarm.
In that regard, at a 1000 vs 1 ratio, it is plausible that aircrafts have peaked in the 50s.
Moreover, those planes could have even better stealthness and dramatically reduced cost by making them out of wood, like many of the very sucessfull WW2 USSR airplanes.
It is important to realize though that those planes should still be modernized variants regarding avionics/radars. And that air to air missiles have not peaked in the 70s, and despite the significant cost increase putting very long range missiles on those remarkably cheap planes can be very worthwile and is trivial.
Another thing to realize is that turboprop planes can be quite fast actually, if made with contra-rotating propellers, a technology that has only seen the light after turboprops were no longer trendy see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95
What I believe the most in though would be drones with guns such as https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-drone-that-can-fire-a-sniper-rifle-while-flying-developed-2022-1?r=US&IR=T
In fact it is doable and has been done to design hardware and software stabilizers for guns on drones.
Guns are disruptively superior to missiles since you can only have a very small amount of missiles on a drone but can have a lot of gun ammo.
Add to that the cheap cost of a swarm of 10000000 of those drones and you supposedly insta-win a war.
To understand that properly, one has to observe a few things:
- war performance is autistic. Nothing like on the movies, humans are rightfully afraid of dying thus they are not actively focusing on killing others but on intimidating others and reducing their exposure. People with guns, aircrafts, helicopters, it doesn't matter it's all the same, haven't you realized it yet? They all do fake shots in the background.
A couple of periodic rounds/fire all day long in a given vague angular direction. It maintains the enemy at bay but to precisely aim at others needs to expose yourself to too much risk. Therefore the reality of war is mostly dumb firing at nothing.
This disruptively change with a drone with a gun, a currently non-existent concept in ukraine. Because the drone operator mostly don't care if the cheap drone is destructed. Most videos of drones are autistic to watch, they really take their time to drop one little grenade unacurately that might kill one guy and gone is the payload the drone needs to be refueled.. despite soldiers being AFK and completely unaware their is a drone right above their heads.
With a gun and a stabilizer, you can multiply the number of kills per drone by 10X-100X, especially compounding the innovative psychological terror.
All my points, the extreme diminishing returns of military performance metrics of most hardware classes, the extreme non-linear increase in cost, and low industrial production capabilities and the superiority of cheap swarming and of non-human fear impaired aiming, each of those individual 4 points are basic and are enough to disrupt the effectiveness of military powers.
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
You seriously believe Russia will run out of tanks before Ukraine?
I'd love to know where you read that, because it wasn't in my post.
You are very clearly implying that,
The TL;DR is that Ukraine has burned through
You answered originally about a statement that Ukraine is suffering major hardware attrition (implied including tanks)
if this is the level of analysis on offer, it's beyond worthless.
The fact that Ukraine will loose the war abruptly (even non-linearly) is trivial and will happen when they e.g. mostly run out of tanks.
This analysis while simple is not worthless but quite obvious and potent and also at this rate will happen in less than 2 years.
Russia too has "burned through" much of their advanced equipment
Your "too" make it seems as if the losses are proportionately comparable, they're largely not since russia has much more reserves, and not just 1960s stuff. Besides contrary to popular belief 60s tanks are still effective. In most cases even modern shielding is insufficent against an ATGMs and therefore useless. It's more a number game.
- This is not an indication that anyone is "winning" or "losing"
Russia is winning the attrition war even though at great losses, and therefore it is an indication that russia will win (if western countries do not send massive amounts of tanks)
So yes you clearly implied that Russia will not win the attrition war.
the purity thinking that modern military machines transcend the old ones is very common and childish.
Once again, you're reading things I didn't write.
You said that idea in a mild form and it is the default mental belief in online forums:
mothballed shit from the '50s and '60s. Of course Ukraine wants good weapons, rather than the outdated military
The difference in effectiveness is extremely overatted however my argument mostly stand for the 70s, less so for the 50/60s but still stands.
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
So what the worlwide coalition in the gulf war managed to destroy Irak air defense quickly and that allows you to generalize from a single event to the U.S having a power that make it transcend Russia performance in Ukraine? What is this imaginary magic technology they have that disrupt their abilties? None, you are just wishful thinkingly over-generalizing.
I have not extensively studied Irak military but:
-
They had osbolete air-defense, zero S-300..
-
I have heard that the Irakis aircrafts pilots universally refused to fly, no will to fight what a joke
“When United States and coalition forces invaded Iraq in 2003 [during Operation Iraqi Freedom], they faced no Iraqi Air Force opposition. Not one Iraqi warplane attacked the invaders as they proceeded toward Baghdad,” Daniel L. Haulman, PhD Air Force Historical Research Agency.
It seems they didn't use air force significantly in gulf war either.
- probably not enough modern ATGMs and probably no GLONAS/GPS
So Irak air defense and will to fight was basically in practice a joke, not something comparable to Ukraine in any realistic way.
Note though that during the Vietnam war, North Vietnam even with virtually no air force managed to take down a crazy high number of U.S planes: 8,540 + 1,351 allied
Nato could turn Russia into a parkinglot in a couple weeks.
A groundless childish fiction based on a weak and uncomparable single event with zero a priori argument, the only one would be the 100 million dollars "stealth" F-35 on which I call bullshit as being not enough to disrupt a war especially considering their weak payloads, maintenance burden and vast detectability loopholes. Besides that point U.S and russian hardware are largely comparable in most cases.
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
You are right I misremembered but:
It is the largest and heaviest Mach 2+ supersonic military aircraft ever built and second to the experimental XB-70 Valkyrie in overall length. As of 2022, it is the largest and heaviest combat aircraft, the fastest bomber in use and the largest and heaviest variable-sweep wing airplane ever flown.[2]
The quality of military analysises on the web is very low as usual.
People think that if the U.S was invading Ukraine they could do it in a matter of months, spoiler: they can't.
Firstly occidental populations are past the point of dying for killing humans, the number of americans willing to die is a scarcer resources than in authoritarian countries.
Secondly, war has changed the prior advantage of air superiority and tank superiority is gone. Anti air such as S-300s have broken the economics and impact of aviation. Secondly ATGMs have broken the economics of tanks.
This is it, we can no longer make disruptive military attacks, it's all a slow attrition and geographic crabbing, with extreme losses of military machines.
I could argue that soviet miltary machines are in many regards highly superior to their U.S counterparts both in metrics and in economics but that is besides the point, for both superpowers, the efficiency and economics of past wars is long gone as Ukraine spectacularly shows.
The only remaining "hopes" for military tactical disruption would either be true drone swarming, which russia doesn't do enough, or tactical nuclear bombs, or bio-weapons or a much more highly targeted attack on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine.
The only classical card Russia has not played is the real terror bombing of using bombers which russia has not used a single time in this war. While modern antiair would destroy a lot of bombers during a swarm, if russia sent enough they would achieve disruptive destruction also, it would be interesting to see the TU-160 in action since it is the fastest military aircraft to exists.
edit tu-160 is the fastest bomber, not the fastest aircraft.
It is the largest and heaviest Mach 2+ supersonic military aircraft ever built and second to the experimental XB-70 Valkyrie in overall length. As of 2022, it is the largest and heaviest combat aircraft, the fastest bomber in use and the largest and heaviest variable-sweep wing airplane ever flown.[2]
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
Ukraine is not one but two countries, split roughly in half, see pasts presidential election polls to contemplate the seggregation
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
What kind of inept denial is this? You seriously believe Russia will run out of tanks before Ukraine? You are wrong by multiple order of magnitudes.
Also the purity thinking that modern military machines transcend the old ones is very common and childish. In fact considering the very strong economic and usefulness diminishing returns of the newer iterations, peak maximally useful military machines are generally from the 70s + a few cheap modernisations on top such as a 1 dollar gps/glonas chip.
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
Ukraine as a country isn't particularly important
It depends what you mean by that, indeed a russian takeover wouldn't directly change the world but Ukraine and Russia are the largest food exporters in the world IIRC.
Ukraine also has (had?) a monopoly in noble gas.
Ukraine was a key driver of Soviet science, engineering and military tech, see e.g the antonov which would BTW enable cheaply to have a potent successor to Hubble if anyone cared as usual.
However Ukraine has lost all its technological glory since the population will to stay in the USSR has not been respected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum
I have extensively studied almost all nootropics and therefore know most of the pharmacological markers that influence intelligence, however I have almost zero knowledge about the genetics correlate of hypermnesy, intelligence and rationality.
Does anyone know what are key "genius" genes?
IMHO I don't think intelligence is mostly bottlenecked by standard genetics, I am far more inclined to believe in early nurturial critical periods.
But I do believe in the potential of a practice that has long been forgotten, artificial cranial elongation:
According to scientists their brain volume is not bigger than a normal human being, and as such cranial elongation only solves one bottleneck: space.
If we identify the mechanics that drive the closing of the brain surface in teenage years and find a way to delay it, or if we intensify neuron and axonal growth during childhood via e.g. BDNF, NGF, etc and maybe growth hormone then we might achieve humans with the biggest brains ever.
Don't get me wrong brain size is only one metric and there might be a bimodal curve to it however our current brain size as shown by studies is totally constrained by a mere contingent scarce sugar consumption optimisation.
VoiceOfLogic
1yr ago
It only takes one powerful real civilization to create millions, billions of ancestor-simulations. We should conclude that most pre-singularity civilizations exist in simulation.
I wish this argument would be true.
It is unfortunately inept however, have you any idea of the energy and computing power needed to simulate a universe? Have you any idea of the energy and computing power needed to simulate a bottle of water at the atomic level? A single cell ? We can barely exhaustively study quantum systems with more than 2 particles IIRC
The universe has finite resources and the constraints of mathematics are universal or even meta-universal and so is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity your hypothetical aliens must bends to those extreme limits. Even mankind has already mostly reached them, we have extreme diminishing returns everywhere.
The burden of proof is just a convenient default rule and only that, a convenience.
The burden of proof in reality is not just about the person making a claim but on everyone if the verisimilitude of the statement has an utilitarian impact, it is my moral duty to steelman arguments from others even if I disagree with their initial formulation, the erudition and epistemological level of the author is semi-contingent and therefore it even follow that the more deficient that person is, the more effort I should allocate to steelman his statement as an intellectual solidarity in the economic sense, as a political way to reduce inequalities and also for various reasons, to increase the coverage of ideas on the semantic mental search space.
unrelated:
The ad-hoc legitimization of inaction as a non or as a lesser cime than action is the biggest cause of suffering on this planet.
While not something I believe is useful because the fate of this war is clear, one could buy and ship military stuff directly, for example https://old.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/sl7dir/did_you_know_that_you_can_order_a_6x6_apc_by/
There are more retired but actually well armored tanks than Ukraine ever owned, Italy alone has more than 600 to give https://qr.ae/prCVC3
In fact there are more retired tanks than there are regular tanks that the EU or even China currently own.
One can collaborativelly constitute an army maximally cheaply, however as usual real effective altruists mostly do not exists.
It seems autism is not associated with high IQ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21272389/
but on the other hand we have this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/
also there is more basis for asperger https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24362849/
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