The idea that Trump pushed back a Taiwan invasion only makes sense if there was, indeed, a plan for a Taiwan invasion. And I'm not sure of that, given the anemic support that China has been giving to Russia for the last 4 years. If China cares enough about its trade with the West to avoid providing significant support to a country that is actively engaged in a proxy war with the West, despite easily being able to provide such support, it seems weird to me that China would enter a possible open war with the West by attacking Taiwan.
I feel like in the last few years there has been a whole genre of "war between the US and China is inevitable" literature that has perhaps made it almost seem like such a war really is inevitable.
I'm not surprised by the popularity of the genre. It is entertaining, it has a certain "back in a Cold War" charm, it benefits China hawks and defense manufacturers.
But I believe that if such a war does happen it will represent not the outcome of inevitability, but rather a massive failure of diplomacy.
That said, I don't have a good track record of geopolitical predictions.
Goodguy
3hr ago
What do you mean by the expense profile? Some quick Googling, maybe inaccurate, shows these annual operating expenses for 2025:
Caterpillar - about $56 billion
Salesforce - about $31 billion
OpenAI - about $28 billion
Are referring to OpenAI's plans for massively increased expenditures in the future?
Goodguy
2d ago
No billionaire has ever called me a nigger, but they have no idea that I exist. If I was powerful enough to be on their radar, there's a good chance that at least one of them would call me a nigger. Or whatever the modern, PC version of it is.
Goodguy
2d ago
What it means is that if you are convinced that Iran controls Hezbollah, you should probably also be convinced that Pakistan controls Lashkar-e-Taiba. Lashkar-e-Taiba is believed to have directly attacked India before. However, Pakistan has never used nuclear weapons against India.
So far in history no country has ever used a nuclear weapon against another since WW2, no matter what kind of conventional warfare it was engaged in otherwise. A country has never even used a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear-armed state, much less a nuclear-armed one that would retaliate by destroying every major city in the attacking country.
Goodguy
2d ago
Technically, the idea that Iran controls Hezbollah is speculation just like the idea that Pakistan controls Lashkar-e-Taiba is speculation. In practice, it's pretty clear that Iran at the very least has substantial influence over Hezbollah, more than any other country does.
Goodguy
2d ago
I think that India and Pakistan probably support paramilitary groups aligned against the other (although they deny it), and India and Pakistan even recently had a short conventional war, yet nukes did not fly. That even though Pakistan is a pretty Islamic country.
Goodguy
3d ago
The Americas weren't primarily discovered and colonized by Europeans who were trying to improve the well-being of their descendants hundreds of years in the future. They were primarily discovered and colonized by Europeans who wanted to improve their own lives immediately, or if not immediately then as quickly as possible. It was lust for immediate enrichment and/or freedom that mainly drove colonization, not self-sacrifice for future generations.
Goodguy
3d ago
Blacks are the most "being an NBA player"-engaged ethnic group in America, yet the vast majority of blacks are not NBA players.
Goodguy
3d ago
The tendency of some Iranians to hate America did not just appear out of nowhere in the 1970s. There was US support for the Shah. When it comes to overall tensions between Iran and the West, we could go further back to the 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran.
Goodguy
3d ago
To be fair, one could argue that everything about our lives is RNG dice rolling. Even for the things that we successfully work to improve about our lives, it's RNG dice rolling that gave us the necessary health, tenacity, intelligence, and lucky happenstance of birth location to actually make the improvent possible.
With some of our closest friends, it's often possible that if on certain days we had stayed home for some random reason (maybe a head cold) instead of going to a particular location, we might never have had the conversation that initiated our friendships. Same with many other things.
But this point of view, while it may possibly be true, is not a very fun or helpful one to hold, it seems. The sense of agency feels good and is motivating.
Goodguy
3d ago
You don't have to buy drinks for women to socialize with them at bars. It's also possible to find chill bars where you can have a conversation at a normal volume. Unfortunately, alcohol is terrible for health.
Goodguy
3d ago
I often get the sense that the red pillers (meaning people who are really into that community, not just anyone who agrees with some of the ideas) don't actually want to have sex with women, they just want the ego boost / validation of having sex with women. They don't seem to be driven by either lust or romance. Instead, they seem to be driven by fear, ego, desire for status, and so on.
Goodguy
3d ago
How do you reconcile that idea with the fact that, even in our post-sexual-revolution age in which women are sexually free and can have jobs, fewer than 10% of adult American men are virgins and only about 30% are single?
Goodguy
3d ago
I partly agree, but at least one very real reason to have a romantic partner even if one is content alone remains: it is to reduce, through both the partnership itself and through children, the chance of being alone in old age.
Goodguy
3d ago
I extensively experimented with that method and in my experience, it's been a dud. Some limited use can help at first, but the nervous system quickly adapts to the substance and becomes dependent on it, at which point the effect on socializing is more often to suppress one's vitality and make one dull than it is to create a sexual glow. And the negative effects on health are really bad.
Goodguy
3d ago
We have seen the brown people march and chant “from the river to the sea” now.
We have seen it. The average Jew is not a politics-obsessed person who watches the latest aggregated videos of demonstrations on social media and automatically distrusts mainstream framings of topics.
Goodguy
3d ago
Well, since I'm not a Jew and also to my knowledge I never did anything to support requests for deportation and the like, I'm probably not the person you should be saying this to.
That said, I also don't like the populist right, so it's my hope that they don't end up supporting the populist right. Or supporting crazed college kids. Or supporting Islamists / Arab nationalists / etc.
Goodguy
3d ago
Well, they're not a monolith. Some of them wanted such radical actions, some were opposed, some indifferent.
My overall point is that, even though Jews in Western countries have been moving a bit to the right recently, white-dominated right-wing populist movements probably have, to a Jewish perspective, so much historical baggage that I don't expect 80% of Jews to support them any time in the near future. They might do it if Muslims rise to make up like 20% of Western populations or something. Even then I'm not sure.
Goodguy
3d ago
How so? They're the ones doing all the "antisemitic" protests that they were complaining so much about.
That's very recent and mostly confined to a small subset of Blue tribe. So far it's not much compared to hundreds of years of being pogromed by people who seemed more like Red tribe.
Then why were they complaining so much about all thr people celebrating October 7th?
You can get viscerally upset watching some people celebrate the killing of your co-ethnics without it making you decide that their entire ethnic group is inherently unassimilable to Western civilization. And I think that Jews have been turning more against Muslim immigration recently.
Goodguy
3d ago
Blue tribe doesn't have the connotations of "stupid angry white hicks who will come to our village and pogrom us".
The Muslim immigration doesn't seem like a viscerally real, tangible problem because so far it has only built up to small minorities in Western countries.
Goodguy
3d ago
Yeah, and every day that the Iranian government survives is also a day that they can use to kill more of their domestic opponents, which to them probably seems like a really really tempting thing to do right about now. I don't think that the American/Israeli bombing raids can really do much to stop a bunch of government supporters with light weapons from going around and killing unarmed or lightly armed civilians.
It's certainly a litmus test of how much support that government actually has from its population, and how many of its elites and security/military personnel are actually committed as opposed to being opportunists. I wouldn't be surprised if the government fell tomorrow, and I would be surprised but not totally shocked if it was still around a year from now.
Goodguy
3d ago
Maybe Jews as a group have too many ancestral memories in their culture to ever end up giving 80% of their money to something like MAGA, at least for the foreseeable future. For them, MAGA has too many unpleasant connotations of past cultures that were violent toward Jews.
On a side note, I think that while Jews lean left in American politics, they also happen to be over-represented relative to their population size in American right-wing politics. Unsurprisingly if one believes in the hypothesis that they are influential mainly because of high intelligence, they're basically over-represented relative to their population size in every political movement that does not deliberately exclude Jews.
Mainstream discourse might act like female attraction is meritocratic, but in my experience if one talks to actual women they tend to be quite open about the non-meritocratic nature of their attraction to men. I suppose, however, that the majority of straight men who have little sexual experience don't talk to many women in general, so they are not exposed to this. And if they were, it would likely not make them feel much better just because it's honest.
It's possible that women's attraction to men, despite not being meritocratic, is more meritocratic than men's attraction to women. In any case, I don't think it's less meritocratic. But that, too, is small comfort to straight men who don't have much sexual experience.
One interesting thing about status is, even high status in a small obscure social scene can get men laid. Being a singer in a local band, for example, or a bartender at a popular bar. There's something about just having high status relative to the people immediately around you that seems to sometimes attract women, even if the guy is not at all high status in the context of his society as a whole.
This can sometimes be kind of a trap for some men, I think. Having relative status in a small social scene often isn't really the best thing for a man in the long run. Being a big shot in a small group made up mostly of drunks, drug users, and people with emotional disorders can get you laid, but it's probably not what you want to spend your life doing.
Another interesting thing I've noticed about attraction is the huge importance that being in a good mood can have. I've sometimes been approached by women (or, at other times, had women make it extremely easy for me to start a conversation with them, which amounts to almost the same thing) when I was in a good mood or just relatively uninhibited. Whereas I don't think I've ever been approached by a woman when I was in a bad mood and/or "stuck in my own head".
Another big one is, not surprisingly, eye contact. It seems to require the engine of mood to drive it, but if that engine is activated then eye contact can convey the energy with remarkable intensity. There have been a handful of times when I felt extremely "on" mood-wise and sexually, just feeling erotically powerful in a relaxed way for whatever reason, and it's like I had a superpower, I could just have fluid sexual "conversations" with women through eyes alone, like one sees in some movies, and so I could very quickly go from zero to making out with some of them, feeling them up, and so on.
It would be awesome if I knew how to put myself into that mood whenever I felt like it, but alas so far I only know that it seems to become more likely if I am genuinely in a good mood and also seems to become more likely if I have been deliberately trying to flirt with women in the recent past thus being I suppose more attuned than usual to that side of existence. One of the interesting things about such experiences is the present-moment awareness. When highly charged like that, you are not seeking a goal of sex, the actual in-the-moment experience of powerful eye contact and the accompanying intense human connection with the woman is so satisfying that everything just feels natural rather than goal-seeking. Unsurprisingly, the natural state feels much better and seems to "work" better (though working better is not the point) than the goal-seeking one. The experience of communicating with intense erotic eye contact is extremely pleasant in its own right. Maybe this is just how naturally sexually uninhibited people normally flirt, but for people like me who started off shy earlier in life and had to work at learning to flirt it's more intermittent.
Sure, but China could help Russia much more than it currently is helping, without breaking its own bank in the process. For example, China could spin up a few military drone factories.
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