I think we're in an AI and tech in general bubble (Cory Doctrow has a good piece explaining why tech is overvalued: only the promise of growth keeps tech P/E above other industries, and eventually this has to settle down). As far as the broader market goes, I'm not sure. I'm up 12% this year on a strong group of rail/industrial/shipping and biotech stocks, but I don't know enough about the broader economy to really say if my picks are representative.
I think this may be the beginning of a long NVIDIA/AI route, but I have no idea if that will ripple to the rest of the economy. Iran and oil seem to be more dominant IMO.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Indeed, it was a submarine that ultimately finished off the Yorktown. How could I have forgotten.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Okay maybe obsolete isn't the right word. I think I mean counterable. Until cheap drones and long range missiles, the only thing that could effectively counter carriers were other carriers or land based air forces. The same is true with battleships. Before carriers, the only thing that could consistently counter a battleship was another battleship.
Motte conspiracy theory. I think @self_made_human and @faceh are the same person. Of course this is total bullshit. Faceh is a lawyer in Florida and Self made human is a doctor in Scotland. A mere examination of the distribution of their posting times shows that they probably are different people. Faceh is also much more gender war focused, while self_made_human has his fingers in almost every pie on the forum. The thing that makes me tongue-in-cheek suggest that they are the same person is a similar writing style: blocky paragraphs with an abundance of links and an abundance of quips.
My friend Dylan and I are embarking on a quest to read as many quality books as we can about US history this year. Although I've been having a very hard time with Indigenous continent (I think it's an awful book), I really enjoyed Ian Toll's The Pacific Crucible both from an entertainment standpoint and from a scholastic one.
Pacific Crucible starts dramatically at Pearl Harbor, backtracks a little bit to explain the US naval doctrine from the Spanish American War onwards and the reasons for Japanese militarism, and then proceeds chronologically until the Battle of Midway, alternating between the American and Japanese perspective. Although there were aspects of these first few months of the war that I feel like Toll covered too quickly (the battle for the East Indies), or even missed entirely (the submarine war on shipping for example), I learned a ton from this book.
-
Fascist elements in the Japanese military began to take over the country in the early 1930s as a result of the Great Depression and perceived slights by Western Powers against the Japanese Empire. These elements were allowed to eventually overthrow the Diet because Hirohito was extremely weak-willed. The invasion of Manchuria and the rest of China was a direct result of this military coup, and the Pacific war was a direct result of this because the US eventually refused to sell oil to Japan anymore.
-
Teddy Roosevelt and FDR were both big believers in naval power, although this naval bias played into a long US naval tradition of excellence at sea because of a need to protect global shipping. FDR actually started a massive carrier buildup in 1938, which made it such that new US carriers were ready as early as the end of 1942, which was incredibly important for faster victory in the Pacific.
-
Lots of racism from both sides which caused incredible lapses of judgement at Pearl Harbor and the Malaya campaign, and at Midway/Coral Sea.
-
At this stage in the war, Japanese pilots seemed to be far superior than the American ones. What prevented more Japanese victories at this stage in the war, as well as the collapse in capabilities from 1943 onward was poor command at a higher level (rivalry between the army and navy, lack of strategic vision or sober analysis of Japanese strength), and poor husbanding of human and material resources (veteran pilots got no break and were not used effectively to train new pilots, but were rather ground down completely by campaigns of attrition.
-
These naval battles seem incredibly confusing and unsettling. All your ships are miles away from each other, and you don't see the enemy basically at all, unless you are a bomber pilot. I suppose this has gotten even worse with the advent of drones or ballistic missiles, which have made carriers obsolete in the same way that carriers made battleships obsolete.
-
It's interesting how propaganda has completely changed our perception of WW2. In this book Toll notes that most Americans weren't super happy to be going to war, but were resigned to get the job done. Very different from how WW2 is portrayed now, as the "good war".
thejdizzler
15d ago
Eastern bloc science fiction is worth checking out. Stanislaw Lem is my favorite of these, but there's some cool soviet writers as well.
thejdizzler
16d ago
The quarterly profits comment was a bit tongue in cheek. I am talking about 2000+ years because that’s what this existential risk planning entails. There are arguably only 2 countries (Japan and China) that have been around culturally that long, 1 institution (the Catholic Church), and as far as I know no corporations.
thejdizzler
16d ago
Man I actually love this solution. At worst the billionaires would just massively bribe part of the population, which would certainly help alleviate the current problem.
thejdizzler
16d ago
Longtermism has never been a long term policy of a corporation, nation, or even family. Unless there’s something that boosts quarterly profits, it’s not happening.
thejdizzler
16d ago
Okay but why would anyone actually want to live on Mars? You basically have to live inside 24/7 in quarters that are probably quite similar to a submarine, with crazy rules and regulations to make sure nothing goes wrong. It's just not very appealing to the vast majority of people, and with the demographic crisis on earth, it really doesn't seem like something many people are going to volunteer for.
thejdizzler
16d ago
- Work: At a conference in Chicago this week, which feels like a bit of a vacation!
- Fitness: 11 hours last week, will be quite a bit lower this week as I'm mainly running at my parents' house and I can't do as high of volume of pure running. Expect to be around 8-9 hours this week. Feeling quite fit: HRV and RHR both spiked in the appropriate direction and my workout times have been getting better and better.
- Intellectual Stuff: Finished Marx and a Pacific War book this week. Haven't been amazing about doing my Italian and Spanish while I've been at my parents'. Planning out blog posts for this month too.
- Finances: As detailed in a Sunday post, my parents are giving me a large sum of money to help with buying a house. I probably won't use it for that right away, but it's nice to know I'll be able to make a large downpayment if I want to. I am slightly worried that this money is going to influence my spending behavior, so I'm determined to stick to my spending targets for at least the rest of this year. Dividends and interest can just help me save more. To that end I was well below my budget of $3200 last month (2750) and also made about a thousand dollars more than normal (checking account deal, cat sitting, PT cash back, substack subscribers, etc).
- Dating: Masturbated once to porn this week, but otherwise was completely clean all week. Went on a date last Wednesday, but didn't really like the girl despite her being perfect on paper. have paused all the dating apps and am not going to seek out a relationship deliberately right now.
- Tarot: Really good session with my ex-roommate who's still a bit frustrating to talk to (he is really bad at engaging with his desires or using his will).
- Socializing: None really this week as I've been back in Chicago. Visited my godparents and their kids and played Mahjong with my parents which I guess counts.
- Screen time: 1.5 hours, which I think I can get to one hour with a bit more work
thejdizzler
16d ago
Ahh yes you and the other commenters are correct. I mistakenly thought the 1:17 was during the Toba event (massive volcano eruption 30k years ago) but looks like that's wrong from a quick google search.
thejdizzler
16d ago
I completely disagree with the comparison to airplanes because it should have been obvious that flight was possible in general: birds, bats, and insects can all do it, so it should be possible in general.
I'm also not saying that rocketry is impossible, rather it's not economical. We won't go to space if there's no $$$ in space, and as far as I can tell, the only $$$ in space doesn't require humans.
I'm also curious how you think AI advances are actually impacting the material world. All I see is improvements in software engineering.
thejdizzler
17d ago
When your vision of greatness is fucking stupid I think I'm allowed to question it. There are other ways to grow on earth that don't require us to spend trillions of dollars to live in submarine for the rest of our lives.
I was thinking of the Russia mission. I think I must have watched a sensational YouTube video about that that was not accurate. Thanks for the correction. Depression is quite different from conflict.
thejdizzler
17d ago
Incredibly detailed rebuttal, AAQC nominated. I can't really disagree with any of the specific rebuttals, although if I could revise my post I would argue that we should be focusing on developing the technologies required for this kind of self-sufficiency (Air miners, more advanced 3D printing, large scale organismal gene editing), before we set our sights on Mars. The ecological argument was not necessarily that we should not colonize space, but rather we are focusing on the wrong aspects of question (how to get there) instead of how to survive there. The longest mission conducted outside of earth orbit is still Apollo, and it seems quite hubristic to me to assume we can even survive the journey to Mars when we haven't spent even a month outside of Earth's magnetosphere.
I don't think your peasant analogy is a good one. That peasant good see how that land might be incredibly valuable: it's good farming land that a honest man could make a living on after all. The basic technology to reach that land existed in 1350: the ship, and although ships 250 years later were slightly more advanced, they still would have been recognizable to a person from 1350. Not so with what you're suggesting. A world of asteroid mining, artificial wombs, and AI data centers in space is unrecognizable to a person today, and potentially not even a possibility. I just don't see this future emerging in a world where technological development is slowing, demographics are collapsing, and there's no actual incentive to send humans (rather than robots or Von Neumann probes) to space. Only time will tell which of us is right.
I also share your pessimism about government spending, but there are a lot of other things besides space (biological research, creating a circular economy, reducing the tax burden, etc.) that the government could be spending money on.
thejdizzler
17d ago
Well I can't argue with AGI because that's a religious idea. I guess we'll have to see how that all plays out.
thejdizzler
17d ago
It's from this article. He calculates it from the ISS budget, which is $3B a year for 7 astronauts. 3,000 million/ 7 /365 ~ 1 M. Of course the cost is probably a bit lower than that given what you said about on the ground costs, but it's still higher than $35k because of launch costs.
Didn't know about the mouse thing, that's pretty cool. I assume the litters were not born in space though?
thejdizzler
17d ago
AGI can't overcome fundamental biophysical constraints. If something is impossible given our energy/ecological/human resources, it will not happen, no matter how much intelligence we throw at it.
thejdizzler
17d ago
I agree, and this is why I switched my major from aero/astro to biology (and ecology) in college. Self-sustaining biological systems are the most interesting research topic out there right now IMO.
thejdizzler
17d ago
Fair point about the energy utilization, although I think ecology is still quite important. Runaway viral infections of humans or crops could completely derail this kind of system.
As I said in a reply to another person, and another commenter has said to you, the frontier is not a good metaphor for a Mars colony. Rules and regulations will be extremely tight for survival reasons, and the kind of person who would go to the frontier in the past would not do very well at all in an environment that is far stricter than almost any society on earth.
I think it's ludicrous to imagine that colonists will be in any sense independent from earth, at least for the first few decades. It's not like the American West where you go be a trapper or homesteader and survive without external supplies. On Mars we will need continuous shipments from Earth and tightly regulated social systems. This is why I don't think the frontier metaphor is apt at all. Space isn't a release valve for societies independent weirdos, it's an extremely inhospitable environment that will require massive coordination to face.
thejdizzler
17d ago
Well we could do this, but for this purpose, we don't need an asteroid full of gold at all! We already have crypto for something like this. In order for the asteroid metal to be valuable we have to get it to earth. Otherwise it's just another store of value, which we can do without the hassle of asteroid mining.
thejdizzler
17d ago
Well a house would reduce my "spending" considerably. My biggest monthly expenses is rent. A house could turn this into a zero, or potentially positive category for me.
It's weird man because the war increases rates (good for shipping) but also increases risk for losses (bad for shipping). If the war continues long-term there will be less shipping volume total. The US backstop of oil shipping is another wildcard that I don't know how to interpret.
More options
Context Copy link