dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
American plumbers and factory workers probably both earn more and have a higher employment rate compared to their German equivalent.
Don't you need to be at least a little smart to be an electrician or a plumber? Moreso if you are self-employed doing these things and making a nice amount of money?
I've done my own electrical work and plumbing at home and it requires a non-trivial amount of attention to detail and being able to do some basic computation. I probably couldn't do it stoned. Surely 100 IQ minimum needed to be employable.
dr_analog
razorboy
3hr ago
"Unions good" is a profoundly alien idea to me. What do you have in mind?
thesis of a possible effort-post. does this have legs?
Globalization didn’t have to break the working class, but blank slate liberalism did
A few decades ago you could show up with a 3rd grade education and still get a decent factory job that fed your family and gave your life... maybe not meaning, but some dignity. Today, those jobs are gone. Globalization took them, and now America has a surplus class of unemployable and underemployable mopes; people born too late for easy jobs but too early for gay-space communism to take care of them. They're stuck, adrift.
Was there any way to help them? Was the populist backlash unavoidable except for the choice of the form of our destroyer, Bernie Sanders’ classist rage or Trump's MAGA nationalist rage?
Is this a false choice? Yes, but the solution hinges on IQ realism. It hinges on slaying blank slate liberalism.
Countries like Germany faced the same global pressures but came out intact. They kept their working class employed, respected, and connected to dignity. How? By accepting a truth America refused: not everyone is wired for lambda calculus. Germany didn’t chase a fantasy of universal upskilling, or telling freshly unemployed coal miners to learn to code. Instead, they built protected, respected, cottage industries and stable vocational tracks with early sorting, precisely for the millions who weren't destined to debug beta reductions.
America, by contrast, swallowed a comforting lie: that we could escape globalization’s consequences without sacrifice. We embraced blank slate thinking, believing with enough TED talks and vocational bootcamps everyone could become high-skilled, high-status knowledge workers. We decided dignity wasn’t found in factories or plumbing, but in laptops and cubicles. Work that liberals secretly preferred.
But the bell curve didn’t care. IQ didn't budge. And so today, millions of Americans remain underemployed, abandoned, and pissed off.
Globalization didn't have to do this. Our denial of human cognitive differences, our stubborn insistence on the blank slate, did.
Germany got it right. America told itself comforting lies.
dr_analog
razorboy
1d ago
I really wish it was possible to search flash cartoons. There's so many from 2000-2005 I just cannot find anymore.
Like that one with a gigantic Zangief in space on collision course for Earth and all of the video game characters become an army trying to stop him.
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
Hey man, you can't learn things unless you are willing to experiment.
Drug decriminalization seemed like a good idea at the time. Portugal had some promising early results and we saw signs of harm that the war on drugs was causing.
China was an experiment in sweet sweet capitalism inducing democracy that appears to have fairly clearly failed.
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
who cares what Vietnam's and Cambodia's tariffs on the US are? those places are poor AF!
why is that how you decide to set your tariffs? we just going by vibes here?
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
That is an excellent point.
Though he's being held in prison in El Salvador? Because the US said so? And he has no rights as an El Salvsdor citizen himself to demand his release?
dr_analog
razorboy
4d ago
Okay so suppose a US citizen is wrongfully held in a foreign prison. What could a US court do to fix that? The executive has a lot of tools to fix that, but courts don't? If the executive is not interested in fixing it, aren't they just screwed?
dr_analog
razorboy
4d ago
Something like 100 US citizens have been wrongfully deported the last two decades. I can't find any case law about it though. It seems the error is discovered (or a complaint is made) and they are eventually awarded damages. The government has apparently never argued that our courts have no jurisdiction over these deportees, but I'm not clear why the arguments being posed by Trump's lawyers would be any different?
dr_analog
razorboy
4d ago
I had to read several articles about this to really understand
- he illegally entered the US
- he applied for asylum, citing danger if he returned to El Salvador
- a judge denied his asylum request
- but a judge did sympathize and say he can't be deported back to El Salvador
- he's still an illegal alien!
- presumably the US tried to find another place to send him, but couldn't
- so he remained in the US
- until they accidentally deported him to El Salvador for thinking he was part of a gang
dr_analog
razorboy
4d ago
Given that the US very much wanted Russia to join the capitalist democratic world order and get rich and fat and bent over backwards to try to make it happen I don't see that as a huge credit to him. There was an oil boom, forgiveness of debts, invitation to the WTO, and even talks of having them join NATO and he squandered all of it. It was like a once in a civilization offer.
dr_analog
razorboy
5d ago
I would just like to underscore what a huge bitch I still think Putin is.
I've heard commodities traders say Gazprom would be the world's most valuable company if it wasn't inside of Putin's oligarchy, for example.
He has made the world strictly worse, especially for Russians.
NATO does not, currently, have any nukes 'forward positioned'. If they wanted to do so, then placing nukes in the Baltic states would be the obvious first port of call, as they are just as close to Russian cities as Ukrainian nukes would be. But why bother moving the nukes when you can already achieve the same with subs? Boomer subs have been capable of operating within the Baltic and Barents sea for a very long time, with flight times to Moscow in the five minute range.
Curious. How much payload could subs deliver versus other approaches? I assume if you want the first strike advantage you want to launch as much as possible and I'm guessing without much knowledge myself that the subs are more limited.
Additionally, this is a problem that Russia - or at least the USSR - was keenly aware of and had already solved. They knew that Moscow could be annihilated with, worst case, only five minutes warning and built their strategic deterrence accordingly. Their ICBM fields are located deep in the interior, each silo spaced far from the others and hardened against anything but a nuclear direct hit.
Do they still launch if all of the leadership are vaporized in the first 5-10 minutes though? Who gives that order? Does the order come in the 20 subsequent minutes it takes to vaporize the rest of their stuff?
Funny how these TIL posts always seem to update in favor of Russia, isn’t it? No one ever comments “I revisited my strategic assumptions, and it turns out Putin is a huge bitch. Like, tinpot-dictator paranoia. Now I’m more sympathetic to the Ukrainians.” There’s no alpha in agreeing with the mainstream narrative.
Does it help to say I still think Putin is a huge bitch, like tinpot-dictator paranoid, and I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and if I had my choice we'd hit Putin with a nuke while he's hiding in his giant palace and only kill his most devoted sycophants? On a moral level, why the fuck can't Ukraine join NATO? Like they have every reason to distrust Russia and should be allowed to side with NATO.
Like somewhere in the above I wonder if we could actually be cold and logical enough to just first strike nuke Russia and totally wipe out their ability to retaliate and rid ourselves of this problem. Sure it's ghoulish, but think of it: a world without any threat from Russia ever again. The best time to have nuked Russia was in 1945. The second best time is now. Sorry we ever doubted you, John von Neumann (PBUH!)
How's that for finding alpha?
Pushing Finland into NATO?
As I said somewhere in a related descendant of this thread, I think Putin was expecting Ukraine to cave immediately and demonstrate why you should not gesture in the direction of NATO. This isn't going how they planned and all of their actions afterwards have been bad.
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
Do they? Despite this being a plot device in Dr. Strangelove, I've only heard what functor said above.
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
Neither the American or Russian deep states are going to gamble the fate of the country on the President getting hustled out of bed in time.
Asuming we know where all of their nuclear weapon infrastructure is, ~5 minutes isn't enough time to confirm and launch before they're obliterated though, no?
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
Clod speculates that the letters could also say things like "In the event that the UK is vaporized, please put yourself under the command of an ally" or "there's no point in retaliation, simply ends more lives. Just live your life in peace the best you can". They're rewritten by each incoming PM, and the letters are ripped up when they leave. Imagine what Keir Starmer might have put in his!
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.
I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.
Isn't Ukraine the best positioning to nuke every major city in Russia and tons of military infrastructure in <5 minutes though?
(and now Finland!)
I expect they thought Ukraine would fold like a wet napkin and send a powerful signal to the remaining states not to align with NATO.
This also doesn't explain why Russia is specifically focusing on Donetsk and the east.
Those are probably the only places they can reasonably capture after realizing Ukraine would not be easy?
On MAD, some is more MA than others
One detail about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that I was not really aware of until now is the relative asymmetry of it.
In a nuclear exchange, MAD deterrence depends on both sides being able and wiling to destroy the other if they detect a first strike.
In the case of NATO vs Russia, MAD is not even! If Russia decides to first strike NATO, it's possible they could wipe out Europe before it has time to respond, in perhaps 10 minutes. But the US part of NATO is another story, and could take up to 30 minutes to wipe out. That's considerably more time for the US to order and launch a counterstrike that wipes out Russia.
The inverse does not hold, however. NATO can launch a first strike on Russia that ends them entirely in 10 minutes, cutting off options to respond. To be clear here some response would happen, like a few cities within the NATO bloc get nuked, but it's quite probable Russia could be wiped out entirely with only a minor amount of apocalyptic damage done to NATO.
What further alarms Russia is that this 10 minute window drops considerably if Ukraine is added to NATO. A decapitation strike against major cities in Russia launched from Ukraine could take as little as 5 minutes. That's not even enough time to notice, get positive confirmation and wake people up: Russian leadership would just sleep through Armageddon.
If you take Russia at face value, and that they invaded Ukraine because it would not commit to neutrality, it would seem to be a strategic blunder on the side of the US to not consider this more seriously. The logic of launching a first strike against Russia seems crazy to us, but that's almost certainly playing half-court basketball. If you think like a Russian, people who have endured centuries of extremely cruel militaristic and fuck-you-got-mine rule, a cold blooded NATO first strike that sacrificed a mere tens of millions in deaths in Europe might be a real fear. Especially if Russia senses its own competence wrt nuclear war is weakening. Also it's not like the US is not capable of unspeakable hypocrisy and cruelty when it comes to geopolitics. Regime change is a thing we've gleefully engaged in.
Anyway, learning about this asymmetry in nuclear MAD makes me more sympathetic to Russia's POV. The war with Ukraine was not inevitable and the possibility of allying Ukraine with NATO has, in hindsight, high cost with relatively little upside?
Am I misreading anything with the MAD situation? I understand there exist planes and subs that can deliver nuclear warheads but I don't see Russia's force projection capabilities being able to fulfill the retaliatory threat. For example, I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.
Carrying a big stick sounds important for global stability, but probably also avoiding scaring the shit out of failing and desperate nuclear armed powers is key.
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
A genre I really enjoy is "competence porn," in which a character or characters overcome challenges and trials via being really good at what they do, either against the uncaring Universe or against an opponent who is also really good at what they do
This is the opposite of competence porn, but you may enjoy this movie called Blue Ruin.
This totally normal average guy discovers that the guy who killed his parents is being released from jail early. Totally normal average guy decides he's going to kill him, but... he's not a skilled assassin or anything. He's got average skills. He struggles to do basic action movie things a hero does effortlessly. He misses a shot at point blank range. He tries to slash tires and hurts himself. Stuff, if you really think about it, most normal people would screw up too.
It makes the movie extremely tense and gripping, IMO.
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
The $variable syntax originates from Unix shell scripting, which Perl, PHP and others have taken after.
Right, in my (anecdotal) understanding even people without these qualifications or strong brains made a decent living before globalization.
My own father and uncles came to the US in the 70s (illegally!) with a 3rd grade education and no local language skills or writing skills (in any language), got jobs as construction workers and masons and still were able to buy houses and provide for big families.
They're not dumb, as they have started small business since then and have become substantially wealthier, but the work they were doing did not require even electrician or plumber level brain power and certainly not any credentials.
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