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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25102 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles will be the nerds who design and the blue collars who build the high tech military gear. Especially with something as fast as hypersonics, a trans furry, or well any other human, would just be too slow to really matter. If we want successful products from nerds/builders, we probably ought let them be meritocratic in their own domains rather than force them to include a bunch of trans furries or other diversity hires.

There might be some trans furries designing and building the gear, though they'll be working for contractors rather than military members (I knew one trans person when I was in that field. No furries as far as I know, but they tended to keep it (that is, their tail) in their pants back then).

I gather that trans/furries/trans furries are greatly overrepresented among the relevant nerds.

Myths are powerful things. Anyone can just tell a story, and whether it's believed tells you more about the culture that believes the myth than it does about the subject of the story.

Steve Hsu estimated Chinese engineering pipeline produces 10-15x more graduates per year than the US one.

Chinese government as of late has tried to lower investment into IT bullshit and promote investment into industry and actual tangible technologies, not just apps.

Graduate quality depends. Per capita that's only 2-3x more than the US, on a quality adjusted per capita basis it's probably roughly the same. And once you add in the US's allies (including India, they'll definitely choose US over China) the total "quality" available to the US probably equals that available to China, and if you include the fact that the US poaches the best Chinese while the reverse doesn't happen the US (and its allies) come out ahead compared to China.

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