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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3999 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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There's a presidential debate on Thursday; there's two effort posts in the back on my head, neither of them particularly time-sensitive. There's a brewing potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. South Africa's coalition government continues to take shape following their general election. Milei in Argentina claims to have officially solved the persistent inflation problem.

There's a brewing potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

I mean, yes, there is, and I post about it often enough (to the point that I sometimes worry I'm being a broken record/single-issue poster, though that's probably just unfounded anxiety), but to a fair extent we're all just reading tea leaves on the biggest question i.e. "will they do it?". Nobody knows for sure except maybe the CPC and the Five Eyes, and not even necessarily them if the CPC's plan is the highly-sensible "have it ready to go, but call GO or NO-GO based on exactly how much of a shitstorm the US election is" (which in turn means the Five Eyes can't know - "you can't know what I'm going to do if I don't know it myself", or as Sun Tzu put it, "the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it.").

I mean, I suppose I could bang on more about my advice regarding this i.e. "the chance is high enough that mild prep vs. nuclear war is extremely, obviously justified; extreme prep may be worth it if you have the means, but moderate prep outside of special cases like 'if you live in an obvious nuke target, you might want to either stop doing that or pre-arrange somewhere else to go' is usually merely an error that doesn't engage a plausible worldline". But, again, I don't like to be a broken record.

have it ready to go, but call GO or NO-GO based on exactly how much of a shitstorm the US election is"

Doesn’t the invasion window end before the election?

Yes, but it's not like there can't be shit flying before the actual vote.

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