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walleeee
searching PlanetScale…
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121.
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by
walleeee
2y ago
> Russia, China, Iran, North Korea... and everybody else. Something is happening in Kazan as we speak. In attendance are many among your "everybody else", many of whom have no great love for any of these four. It is worth askin
122.
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walleeee
2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong I take no stance on the article or parent comment, just for your reading.
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walleeee
2y ago
I invite readers to note the couching here of a technical/strategic point in a moral/historical comparison, and to consider whether the latter is warranted
124.
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walleeee
2y ago
Globally price-competitive domestic electric car production is a national security concern only if we are willing to accept a rather short time horizon and a rather narrow definition of security in our analysis. This kind of article can per
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walleeee
2y ago
Assuming one must first conceive of deception before deploying it, one needs not only self-awareness but also theory of mind, no? Awareness alone draws no distinction between self and other. I wonder however whether deception is not an inve
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walleeee
2y ago
My intuition is similar; software can distribute responsibility in ways no previous vehicle could, by virtue of speed, scale, and mode of interaction (in a McLuhan-ish "medium as message" sense). But it's still an evolution o
127.
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walleeee
2y ago
To quote Penrose: "I don't like the word materialism because we don't know what the material is." It's all a quandary, no? Wonderfully useful predictive models aside, we have almost as little metaphysical/ontol
128.
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walleeee
2y ago
I think this sort of analysis is valid and fruitful in a very general sense. Software as a recently adopted vehicle in a long tradition of liability displacement / diffusion of responsibility / agency modification
129.
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walleeee
2y ago
Not to dispute your particular comment, which I think is right, but it's worth pointing out we're full steam ahead on paperclips regardless of any AI company. This has been true for some 300 years, longer depending how flexible we
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walleeee
2y ago
You may be correct on at least one point: the DOD may have stepped us all down from WW3 recently, to the chagrin of other elements of the establishment who have gotten used to whispering foreign policy into the relevant ears with no pushb
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walleeee
2y ago
Some in the US government do tend to project their own bloody-mindedness onto the Chinese, yes
132.
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walleeee
2y ago
The most insightful comment I have seen in this thread. It assumes a single investment context, the global (read: western) financial system, right? Is the latter more firmly wedded to the idea of growth than the rest of the world, or is tha
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walleeee
2y ago
The reality is that many people with a Ram are towing toys (boats, ATVs, etc) or, as you say, a travel trailer, not a work trailer. Which brings us to the question of need vs want. Plus, if work vehicles became lighter, work trailers would
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walleeee
2y ago
The military leadership does not want a war it knows it can't win, that's correct. This is why it has more or less openly rebuked the government on at least one occasion: pointing out that Hamas is an idea, for instance, and that
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walleeee
2y ago
> Hamas' attempt to drag them into war In fairness, this omits mention of other actors which have tried to bait Iran (and thereby drag the United States) into wider regional conflict Or perhaps Hamas assassinated its own politburo c
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walleeee
2y ago
Are the actions of these individuals really the equivalent of financial fraud? Assange and Snowden especially, who revealed to the public crimes perpetrated by agents of the US federal govt.
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walleeee
2y ago
A single well-placed rocket/missile/drone crater in the deck of a carrier, without sinking or even seriously wounding it, is enough to render it useless and put it out of comission for months if not longer. Keeping a carrier group
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walleeee
2y ago
Certainly tradeoffs do not discredit a proposal wholesale. That's true, and it's beside the point. This thread is also beside the point. The relevant sphere is the general public discourse, which is largely naive and unexamined. T
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walleeee
2y ago
> As if nobody has considered these drawbacks already There is a real and consequential lack of attention to detail in this regard, though. Energy is a tricky and subtle topic which is very commonly oversimplified in the press, in politi
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walleeee
2y ago
Yes, indeed it is a drug addiction.
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walleeee
2y ago
While I agree with the "live and let live" (or perhaps "die and let live") spirit of your latter paragraph, it does not address one of the more vivid arguments against your position: that the vast network of machinery wi
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walleeee
2y ago
To call the picture you're attempting to paint in this thread simplistic in the extreme would be generous. This is a proxy war and I suspect you know that.
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walleeee
2y ago
> Hardline ~~socialist~~ countries This is true of any regime which refuses to adapt to reality. And in any case it's more or less tautological: a "hardliner" is defined precisely by the refusal to budge even when it might
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walleeee
2y ago
It's not enough to count the problems in the list, you also weigh the ones it solves against those it introduces. I'm not a nuclear engineer, but none of the issues seem insurmountable, and some are addressed in modern designs. I
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walleeee
2y ago
> You really believe it would have been possible to construct a modern wind turbine with the materials available in 1950? Sure, modern materials make for a more modern wind turbine. But they don't shift the paradigm. Nothing has sin
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walleeee
2y ago
Neither semiconductors nor plastics shift the energy generation paradigm. "Advanced materials"- alright, well, which ones? And do they give us a better return than good old steam? Wind, solar and batteries are products of combusti
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walleeee
2y ago
> many company divisions are set up in such a way to dilute guilt not only the internal structure of the firm, but the legal framework in which firms operate, not to mention the cultural mythology situating it all diffusion of responsibi
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walleeee
2y ago
Thanks. I still think civilization without society works pretty well as a (necessarily lossy) compression. The US as a civilization without a sense of communitarian civics. The presence of such in rare cases (e.g. Belmont) puts its broader
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walleeee
2y ago
You wouldn't say "civilization without society" is pretty close to your first two paragraphs in your comment? Maybe I need a refresher.
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walleeee
2y ago
In a word, that it is a civilization without society, or perhaps a society without culture, which (by this lack) is engineering its own decay.
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