functor
8hr ago
The electrical grid needs baseload power. In this graph green represents wind production in Sweden each day. A serverhall or steel mill has a fairly constant consumption rate. During During various Dunkelflautes the wind power production has dropped to low single digit percentages of installed capacity.
Some countries like Norway and Iceland are blessed with boundless cheap baseload power from hydro and geothermal. The rest of us need to create it. Nuclear is reliable, not dependent on weather and provides a stable and green electrical grid. There wasn't a single hour in which Germany's electrical grid was greener than France's last year. France bet on nuclear, Germany on fossil fuels with wind when the weather is good.
Too much focus is spent on electricity production and not enough on the grid. A nuclear powerplant 50 km from a city requires a 50 km cable that is operating at an average of 90-95% capacity. Windpower requires multiple power lines that can be a thousand km long to connect the city to various different wind parks, where it might be windy at different times. This is not green, cheap or efficient.
functor
3d ago
The just push migrants to Europe while helping them cross the Mediterranean while their NGOs are the biggest lobbying groups for mass immigration.
functor
4d ago
Maybe the ADL can explain to its home country that such conspiracies are racist and that social media companies should ban people who spread such hate.
functor
4d ago
Israel was engaging in acts of war against Palestine. They bombed Gaza before october 7th, they had killed hundreds of Palestinians earlier in 2023, they were engaging in an illegal blockade and stealing land.
functor
4d ago
And the fact that Israel is costing a ton of money, genoiciding christians and filling Europe with migrants. We have 250 000 Syrians in Sweden and now the country has been taken over by jihadists with fancy foreign weapons who got air support.
functor
6d ago
expressed willingness to sell out his base.
No, he is focusing on "Make America great again", not wasting endless sums of money fighting wars in the middle east that end up destroying the local christian population. His base has won absolutely nothing from the last few decades of neo con wars. His base got nothing but debt and mentally ill veterans from the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. Providing Israel with endless welfare is the opposite of America first.
Will the Jews who support the Republican party exclusively because they're the most unwavering about Israel turn coat
Trumps loyalty should be to the US, not people whose loyalty is to other countries.
functor
6d ago
The slogan is "make America great again". Not waste trillions on forever wars in the middle east with no prospect of success. Maga is the opposite of the fiascos of nation building from the mainstream republicans. Genociding the local christian population isn't that popular with young people. Younger voters, including younger republicans skew a lot more pro Palestine. Israel actively supporting jihadists in Syria hurts their supposed "anti-islam" stance.
functor
10d ago
Latin America isn't all socialists, Milei is a latin american. Latin America is populist, clownish and doesn't have as much long term thinking.
functor
12d ago
The wars always follow the same patterns and have since the 1800s. A long backstory is ignored, and instead the new boogeyman is launched. There is no reason why this boogeyman exists, he is just evil and wants to wreck the world. A great sense of urgency is instilled and we all have to act now or else Ho Chi Minh, Gadaffi, Castro or whoever else is going to come to your town and murder babies! They are purely evil and have no arguments whatsoever, they are just cartoon villains.
Then the war starts with a big hype, freedom fries, this next war is so high tech, cheap precise and so different from all the others! Don't ask any critical questions, a few special forces operators can take all of Afghanistan in a few weeks and win! There is complete hype, the media asks barely any critical questions, and the psyops are in overdrive.
Then the war drags on, the casualties and costs mount, the refugee crisis grows and "we will be in Berlin next week" attitude is replaced with cynicism. During this phase the debate doesn't get better because now it is a sensitive topic. The war ends and people still don't want to talk about it, hold anyone responsible and even talk about it. It becomes embarrassing for the "Saddam will nuke as all crowd" when they have to face their fiasco.
These things become public frenzies whipped up by the media that fall apart with critical questioning. This isn't too different from defunding the police in Detroit. Every linkedin user is supposed to cheer it on, and a critical question makes everyone in the room deeply uncomfortable.
The west is incredibly good at psy-ops and unfortunately the main target is western leaders. Western leaders genuinely thought Ukraine's summer 2023 offensive would be a success because they had been psy-oped into thinking Russians are orcs with WWII tech who will collapse at the sight of a modern tank. The support for Ukraine has been haphazard because western leaders have been utterly convinced Russia is going to collapse any moment and the battlefield is Legolas and Aragon turning beheading Uruk-Hai into a sport.
The fact that so many in the west were shocked when the war broke out points to the absolute lack of understanding of the situation and what a filter bubble westerners are stuck in. The reaction was to double down and isolate their filter bubble even further.
During the invasion of Iraq Baghdad Bob was on CNN and there were at least some journalists running around on the ground. Today the media is so focused on purity that we would never see a live interview with even a Ukrainian soldier.
The sad thing is people who think every previous war was a farce will join the hype for the next war.
functor
12d ago
More so than tax incentives they don't benefit from going to war against a large portion of their base. Facebook's users in the US coincide fairly well with boomer conservatives. Alienating millions of users for purity isn't going to be profitable. Driving millions of users away by being woke or even banning them is bad for business. Besides, politics creates user engagement.
At peak banning even Trump supporters were getting banned. That is a huge demographic for facebook adds, partially because of their numbers and partially because trump does well among reasonably well of people that can be target through digital advertising. Democrats have a lot of underclass voters which aren't great for advertising and their more elite voters are less likely to want to use facebook.
functor
13d ago
Funny how Palestinians are supposed to accept being truly defenceless while Ukrainians are defenceless if they have 50k troops.
The violent people overthrew the government, shelled the Donbass for 10 years straight and have been pushing for wwIII for the last two years.
functor
14d ago
In a sense the US does. The US/Britain forced Ukraine to consistently talk the most hawkish stance and reject negotiation with the promise that the US/UK would have their backs. The Ukrainians are slowly waking up to that they are effectively taking the role the taliban had in the 80s. Their job is to be thrown under the bus for America's interests.
functor
14d ago
He is a startup founder with a record high burnrate with a product that isn't good enough to be a commercial product. He has to bring in lots of customers promising it will soon be better. He wants to speedrun to a point in which he can actually generate revenue that can cover his costs.
Chatgpt is not good enough to replace developers, lawyers or any other qualified profession. It is an alternative to google without the ability to insert advertising. Github co-pilot isn't great for overall productivity.
Chatgpt is facing scaling laws. The bigger the model the more power it draws. The size of the model required to be useful is too large for today's hardware and power costs. They can no longer make a model orders of magnitude larger. The datasets are too large to fine tune manually.
Sam Altman is pretty much begging for a nuclear reactor and enough GPUs to swallow all that juice.
After hiring numerous developers during the last month I have concluded that a big portion of the difference between the competent devs and the incompetent ones is that the competent ones are always learning. It isn't necessarily an IQ thing, it is largely an attitude thing. For example some devs with 10+ years experience type extremely slow on a keyboard and don't use any keyboard shortcuts. They can't use git from the terminal and simply fail basic tasks outside their narrow niche. Their attitude is that they just learned how to complete certain tasks and they do those tasks on repeat.
The best ones are trying new things and learning. The better devs often have some strange flavour of linux, like obscure programming languages etc. This isn't because these tools are productive, it is because they learned these tools out of curiosity. To be a solid developer one has to be curious, trying to do things in new ways, trying to understand why things are the way they are and trying to improve.
The Indians have a bad rep because they are the epitome of developers who became developers wthout any passion. Their parents told them to be developers and they grew up in a country in which making money is a priority. They learned a Java version in college and every problem can be solved with the one tool they know. They often work hard but the attitude is solve the task with the simplest possible solution without much engineering skill. When all you have is a hammer the world looks like it is made of nails.
There are of course passionate devs in India but they are fewer as so many people with no interest were pushed in. The irony of Indian devs is that they don't focus on the art side of development but on the hustle side. In practice the people who make a lot of money are those who focus on programming as an art. The lack of Indian open source projects Indians in more niche communities such as functional programming etc says a lot about the attitude.
The best career advice for devs is to not just do what you know but to try new things and learn. Constantly try to do things faster, better, with other tools and from another perspective.
functor
18d ago
No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally. We just wanted to capture/kill Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders, and stop Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist training center. That was accomplished.
Occupying a country to find one person or even a handfull of Saudis and Egyptians is absurd overkill. Besides, the taliban were willing to cooperate to hand them over.
The issue is neocons and globalists can't really accept that there isn't a part of the world without feminism, hollywood movies and American imperialism. They rather spend 20 years bombing a meaningless plot of land than accept that there is a realm outside of the liberal paradigm.
Turns out it's very difficult to change a culture!
They managed to make the west woke. Admittedly it took a century but they assumed they could speed up the process with more advanced tech and military superiority. What was underestimated was the resolve and bravery of the Afghan people, who put up a 20 year long heroic defence.
functor
19d ago
These terrorist attacks have nothing to do with middle eastern conflicts
How would fighting multiple wars in the middle east not be connected to blow back? Having large well organized and well equipped jihadist groups can very well cause terrorism in other countries. 9/11 wouldn't have happened without the CIA-asset Bin Ladin, multiple attacks in Europe have been conducted by people trained in the middle east. The ideological inspiration, propaganda and connections between jihadists in the middle east and the west do exist. Terrorism increased markedly in Europe during ISIS hay day in Syria.
The neo-con project, mass immigration and terrorism are intertwined.
functor
19d ago
Rather amazing that after supporting jihadism since 2003 the US hasn't been hit harder than it has. The US meddling in Syria and the war in Iraq are directly to blame for ISIS, especially combined with operation timber sycamore with the US arming jihadists.
functor
19d ago
We can conclude that there are a lot of white and Asian men who are not getting the academic degrees they would get in a meritocracy. Then the question becomes where do these men end up and how to invest in these sectors. Typically high status low paying jobs such as author, human rights lawyer, journalist, professor etc are being ethnically cleansed of white men while other elite institutions are having an under representation of white men. These men are probably not all giving up on life just because they didn't get into Yale.
functor
19d ago
I’m pretty sure Elon likes hiring H1-B Indians because they are reasonably competent but much cheaper than domestic workers. He dresses it up in a lot of pretty language to cover that up, but that’s the truth. Like a lot of business titans through the years, he ruthlessly optimizes costs wherever possible. Don’t use six dots of glue on the barrel when five could suffice. I doubt Indians have affected his plans to get off the rock, since H1-B visa holders can’t work at Space-X. It’s a government and military contractor so there are heavy security restrictions on foreign nationals from any country working there. The Indians mostly work at Tesla.
One thing that is ignored in this debate is the petrodollar. The US prints money like crazy but keeps the dollar high by pretty much forcing the world to buy American dollars. Don't participate in the American racket and end up like Iran. This means that there are too many dollars and the prices in the US have shot through the moon. The US has become an excessively expensive country with an economy based on finance, insurance and real estate.
This kind of worked when the US was technologically vastly superior to the rest of the world and could force people in other countries to trade bananas and oil for Ford cars. As the rest of the world has been catching up in terms of tech, it is harder for the US to compete when housing prices are multiple times higher in Seattle compared to China or Poland.
American engineers with 100k of student debt, living in mediocre million dollar Seattle homes with 2000 dollar a month medical insurance for their family and who need two cars for their house hold simply can't compete on a global market. There aren't that many technologies that the US is that far ahead that the American company can charge an absurd premium.
The US doesn't seem to want to give up on the empire business so the result is to not lower costs but to press living standards down. Silicon valley real estate has to keep being at an inflated price but US companies can't pay 150 dollars an hour for mediocre web developers for their website when companies in other parts of the world pay 20.
functor
20d ago
The MAGA crowd is like someone who found a genie but can't formulate their wishes well. It is the good old trope of getting your three wishes but each wish comes with a giant caveat.
They wished for ended discrimination against Asians in college admissions and didn't get increased odds of whites being accepted.
They complained about migrant crime and got dorky Indians instead of Guatemalans.
They complained more about migrant crime and got a society in which cops look like soldiers.
They complained about muslim terrorism and got a surveillance state that rivals stasi.
They complained about muslim terrorism but instead of getting an immigration ban after 9/11 they got tens of thousands of largely right wing voters killed/seriously injured fighting wars in the middle east that caused a migrant crisis and effectively ethnically cleansed Christian populations. Their "clash of civilizations" ended with the US supporting Al Qaeda in Syria and opening the flood gates to Europe by bombing Libya.
The migrants are living on welfare they complained. So they got a migrant with a job.
If you can't even state your own self interest how on Earth do you expect to win anything?
functor
21d ago
They also seem to forget that the women would have been pregnant a large portion of the time.
Also performance enhancing drugs have made many of the female pro athletes barely female.
functor
22d ago
The whole Indians debate is perfect example of why high skilled immigration is a bad idea.
The side pushing for more Indians is largely Indian with another prominent figure being Elon who is an immigrant himself. The America first crowd is noticeably more rooted in America. US politics is devolving into the farce that is democracy in Iraq. They don't really need elections as they could just use the census data to assign seats to the Kurdish party, Sunni parti, Shia party etc. The system isn't going to have any long term visions, any cohesion or any sense of national interests. It is going to be each little group squabbling to maximize short sighted self interest.
functor
25d ago
Indian developers are a lot cheaper and most jobs don't require a genius. There are plenty of boring repetitive tasks in tech and often the really talented people aren't good at these tasks because the best developers tend to get bored.
The model that works is two high skill developers in the west managing 8 lower skilled devs in another country. The two high skilled devs will complain endlessly about having to manage "low status" people and review code instead of writing their own but the truth is that Indians are often far more cost effective. The all Indians are awfull trope is exaggerated. There are plenty of awfull Indian devs but there are also high skilled Indian devs.
Nuclear isn't that expensive. France managed to build a majority nuclear grid that has been safe and stable for decades while maintaining sensible electrical prices. The price comes from building one of a kind reactors by companies with little experience while contending with insane levels of regulation.
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