This is a completely inhuman and unamerican take. Money buys secrecy, it always has. Money is a tool, exercising speech is a right. For the Supreme Court to equate them is ahistorical, plutocratic, and terrible. You sound like you support giving corporations the right to vote as well,
Where do you draw the line between money and speech? IE, would you "simply" ban all political advertising completely - one can scream from a soapbox and that's it?
What is actually getting you flagged by the openweights inference providers? Thus far I haven't hit any of the reverse engineering or infosec guardrails that Anthropic is so keen on
I'm not sure that is the comparison - the OP is planning to run an open weights model locally, the obvious comparison would be paying a hosted provider to run the exact same model
The vision of the automated stove is partly fulfilled, at least around San Francisco, by the astounding number of people who get all their meals delivered, for the moment by humans but soon robots.
No more nuclear duck and cover drills; no more fallout shelters scattered around cities.
With modern hydrogen bombs, they are largely a farce anyway. Still, we are only one misinterpreted event away from nuclear escalation. The fact that Russia hasn't used a tactical nuke against Ukraine yet is a miracle and largely thanks to China:
I think under Biden, there were two safeguards: China + Biden threatening to sink the black sea fleet in retaliation. But yeah, Trump's primary international strategy is: whatever lines 'me and my bro's pockets'. If anything, his policies have been a message to many countries that it's probably better to get your own nukes in case the US has you in their crosshairs.
For sure, but it doesn’t pervade public consciousness in the same way. Not sure why, perhaps because the memory of mass-scale war has faded with the previous generations.
Fear of nuclear war was useful for midcentury US elites because it could be transmuted into fear of Communism. Since 1991 it just isn't as useful for that purpose, so the culture industry doesn't push it anymore. Their use against Japan in WW2 has also (just about) fallen out of living memory.
Whenever the "tens of millions killed by communism" number gets trotted out, it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism. Which is fine, but it means you need to go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means (not to mention making per-capita adjustments) as well for a fair point of comparison.
Every person who died of preventable illness because they couldn't afford healthcare? Death by capitalism. Every dude who puts a bullet in their head because of financial strain? Death by capitalism. Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food (the U.K., large swathes of Africa).
Numbers are meaningless when you don't put them in context.
When you conflate "armed soldiers steal the grain you grew and the food you have" with "not assigned resources" you are creating a horrifying and dehumanizing reframing that makes me doubt your basic humanity.
Placing people in a cage and not allowing them to grow food or provide for themselves is similarly murder, not "failing to assign resources"
Your language is worthy of HR layoff talk, but used to describe mass human death, the forced control of dictators to prevent people from having the basic freedom to care for themselves.
Further, placing this in the context of "oh it capitalism also resulted in massive deaths thus we shan't be critical of the dictators doing it" is, uh, much much worse.
> it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism
You mean, those who were forcibly starved by their government, those who were forcibly murdered and displaced by their government, and those who were put into forced labor "re-education" work camps by their government.
I'm not talking about the baseline of human problems and suffering that is everywhere -- that's not communism's fault. Communism is responsible for the large increase in death rate following a country's fall to it, and especially for the murders it commits (literally shooting, hanging, decapitating, working to death in gulags, etc., as well as imprisoning and persecuting dissidents and mass theft of peoples' property leading to mass poverty).
The vast power communist leaders hold always corrupts them and turns them into monsters.
> go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means
> Death by capitalism.
You might as well say that everyone in a family who had a preventable death experienced "death by family". Or that everyone with an employer who had a preventable death experienced "death by employer".
It's not other people's job to prevent a given person's misfortune.
> Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food
That's due to government corruption more than anything else. Government officials should be held accountable and prosecuted.
I'm talking about wrongful deaths. It is wrong for a government to kill people for any reason other than conviction of murder. The Bolsheviks, Red Giard, and Stasi straight up murdered people because they owned means of production, disagreed with communism, or tried to escape to a different country. That us evil.
I know that most of the early deaths under communism were due to starvation, what GP calls "misallocation of resources". Thats a fancy term for stealing. Violation of private property - literally taking people's land and things - is evil and it's also directly responsible for the massive famines that happened under communism.
The longer I live, the more I'm convinced that the idea of communism arises because of envy, and not understanding that wealth doesn't just "exist" statically such that it can be fairly (re)distributed.
The real value is what people sell - either food, clothes, houses, and goods/services. By solving the wrong problem, Communism messes up the motivation to work, produce, and sell. And so everyone becomes far more equal - but poor and starving (except political leaders, they usually do far better than the populace... they're "more equal" than others).
It's an evil idea.
... and I am having trouble understanding why all this needs to be said again. Where the heck is the idea that communism is good coming from? The harrowing biographies and memoirs of those who lived under it are out there - all the content dying, famine, fear, the KGB banging on front doors at 3am to "disappear" people (who return 10 years later and talk about torture, prisons, guards authorized to do "anything" to prisoners, and gulags), the learned willing ignorance ("the less you know, the better you sleep").
I had a Russian co-worker over for dinner once who lived through the tail end of the Soviet Union. "The less you know, the better you sleep" is a quote from him.
I'm astounded that people actually think this is mental gymnastics... would you like the KGB banging on your neighbor's door at 3am and sending them to the gulag for saying something critical of the government?
Collectivization is impossible without expropriating people by force. How would you propose accomplishing that without the government's involvement? Central planning also requires a government to allocate resources and fix prices.
If you disagree, I'm curious what government types you think collectivization and central planning can be accomplished with besides those that directly take charge of those things.
We have some good examples to pick from throughout history - postwar Britain nationalizing major industries, Sweden’s soc-dem era, Allende’s Chile (though the US put a quick stop to that), Israeli kibbutzim…
You are collapsing three different questions into one illogical conclusion, leaning heavily on one of the least successful examples of collectivization in the history of mankind. One could use your line of reasoning to argue that because there are bad capitalist countries with authoritarian governments, who do indeed go door to door and murder its citizenry as political suppression, capitalism itself is bad. But they still wouldn’t be logically correct.
IIRC, the bulletin of atomic scientists stopped tying the clock to nuclear war decades ago, and its recent moves towards midnight have more to do with climate change and AI than nuclear weapons.
Nuclear annihilation on any sort of global scale is further off than ever in the past 60-70 years or so. The doomsday clock is mostly worrying about climate change, conventional war and Facebook boomers spreading and believing fake news.
I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.
With the expiration of New Start earlier this year, there are no nuclear arms control agreements in effect between the US and Russia, which hasn’t been the case since the 1960s. Russia, China, and the US are all actively modernizing and developing new nuclear capabilities. China has been greatly expanding their nuclear arsenal, building hundreds of new silos. North Korea has an expansive set of tactical and strategic nuclear systems and are in strategic cooperation with Russia. Russia is 4 years into a destabilizing land war, have developed several new weapons systems, and are now in a nuclear weapon sharing agreement with Belarus. And I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of other things.
We are in a period of strategic instability and an arms race that is unlike anything we have seen in the last 50 years. You can quibble with the specifics all you want, but I don’t think anyone can argue that we are at a lesser risk of nuclear war that we were, say, 20 or 30 years ago
Russia is bankrupt, and can't develop anything because it sent its best and brightest people to be drone fodder, and they died. If there's a new nuclear power it will be Iran, and if there's a nuclear first strike it will be by Israel.
Plus the current US President has purged most of of the military leaders who might resist any unwise or unlawful orders regarding nuclear weaponry. (Or just in-general, for that matter.) Potential orders he mused-about during his first term.
Yeah, the US regime has basically been speed running the impotent dictator's playbook. Start from a place of weakness and incompetence, and cause a bunch of senseless destruction to distract from it. Using tactical nuclear weapons would be right in line with that, especially after having started this quagmire in Iran with no way to win.
That usually comes up as a detterance which is basically what nukes are at this point. Even Russia is not stupid enough to lob a nuke as an offensive strategy, it is suicide still.
What if they did it? They would be a paria politically, but countries would still buy their oil/gas because they need it and it's cheap, nobody would start nuking Russia over Ukraine [1], and using tactical nukes against nations that don't have them would become much more acceptable.
It is kind of telling that China has to be the ones reigning them in, which is a good sign that they are replacing the US as the world's superpower, which also comes with maintaining some stability in important markets, erm, countries.
Aside from that our best hope is that the functional Russian arsenal is much smaller than Russian claims due to the lack of maintenance, corruption, etc.
[1] Trump would just have a phone call with Putin and then parrot whatever narrative the Kremlin has. For France and UK, nukes are purely for self-protection, so they would only trigger a counter-attack if Russian nukes appear to be coming towards them (so it's probably better for Russia to avoid The Netherlands and Belgium too).
My opnion is that you're underestimating the event where a country uses a nuclear bomb in this way. It signals that they are willing to cross any red lines and become an existential threat. In fact, imagine an alternative scenario where Russia straight up nukes Kiev instead of the gurella warfare and then invasaion/special millitary operation. In that case, there is no way Putin is not done within a week simply due to the fact that he becomes an existential threat for the entire world. A war/definitive millitary becomes much more justifiable in that case than it does currently for the US or EU.
The moment you use them, you lose their value as a deterrance anymore.
The moment you use them, you lose their value as a deterrance anymore.
If they used nukes in Ukraine, the strategic deterrence against other nations with nukes would still be in place.
They didn't use them against Ukraine because of many other reasons, e.g. because they would have taken Kiev in days, it didn't make sense to make land that you want to conquer radioactive, and the political fallout would be too big.
I think now they won't do it because China is too important to them and China made it clear that using tactical nukes is out of the question.
> If they used nukes in Ukraine, the strategic deterrence against other nations with nukes would still be in place.
No it wouldn't be a deterrance anymore again other nations, it will be an actual threat. If they actually do show they are willing to use them in any capacity, esp over Ukraine which is agression they started, other countries cannot just ignore it or bow down to Russia. It also not a deterrance to nuclear powers in the first place and in the second, it becomes an existential threat again.
As for why they didn't use it in Ukraine is primary because they have never done so. The political fallout will be suicide, there is no other option.
I don't see how China fits in with the tactical nukes thing. Your position of "Russia could have nuked, they just didn't want nuclear fallout, political fallout and China being mean" instead of "they didn't nuke because it will be unprecedented and consequeunces will be dire bodering on absolute destruction" seems weak to me.
Risk of any use of nuclear weapons is quite different from "nuclear annihilation". There are vastly fewer and vastly less powerful nuclear bombs/warheads today than 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.
The shelling of Mauripol in Ukraine at the beginning of the current war was roughly equivalent to Hiroshima in explosive yield. It had a lot more destructive power though, since it was distributed across a huge amount of explosions, and blast damage falls approximately with the square of distance to center of explosion.
Mauripol in 2022 was not a place you wanted to be in. When a bomb falls on top of you, it makes no difference if it is small nuclear or large conventional, you very much die anyway.
I'm not trying to make war seem nice or sell the idea that the world is heading in a great direction, I'm trying to make the point that nuclear annihilation is less of a threat today than before.
This is actually still a reasonable concern to have. Coincidentally, just yesterday I came across a reference to the book Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, speculating on how a global thermonuclear war could start in modern times.
The scenario she presents is fictional, but it’s all based on current nuclear arsenals and response protocols. While what I’ve read of it certainly makes it seem like a worst-case scenario in a “nearly everything that can go wrong does” sense, it’s disturbing how relatively few things going wrong it actually takes—in a span of under two hours—to reach “civilizational collapse” level outcomes.
But now with nukes in major countries arsenals, any of the three new risks you mentioned could have escalated to civilization ending nuclear wars. It's still a miracle that it hasn't happened, but I wouldn't be so optimistic.
Imagine climate change causing a drought in South Asia leading to conflicts between India, China and Pakistan that escalates into a nuclear war. Imagine if the regular wars in Ukraine and the Middle East ends up with Russia or Israel using a nuke. Imagine if Facebook boomers vote someone batshit crazy into office and drops a nuke on a long time hostile state just for TV ratings…
On the one hand, one of the major nuclear powers is embroiled in a war in Europe. Which is extremely bad news and clearly makes the probability of nuclear war increase.
On the other hand, we're getting better and better at targeting, which means much smaller warheads can get the job done. We have little use for 50MT behemoths any more (excepting doomsday weapons).
If Annie Jacobsens research is at all accurate, she mentions that since the 60s they've run simulations constantly to project how a nuclear conflict would escalate, and in that time there's never been a simulation that resulted in an outcome other than complete and total global nuclear exchange. Even from a small scale tactical deployment, simulations always show it escalating to a full cataclysm.
I personally don't have the here-nor-there to say otherwise, but it does seem likely that the type of device doesn't really change the outcome.
If "complete and total global nuclear exchange" means "we shoot off all the nukes we've got", then how bad that is depends on how many nukes there are - not whether we shoot all of them or not.
"Complete and total global nuclear exchange" is not so bad when there are 50 100Kt nukes, and is really, really bad when there are 10,000 10Mt nukes. And we've drastically reduced both the number of nuclear weapons and their average yield since the cold war (https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/). Which is great news!
I'm no expert, but from a little reading it seems all-out nuclear war would be not just survivable for the species, but not even that bad for most of humanity comparing to disasters of yore. South America, Oceania, much of Asia, and Africa would be ~fine.
To be honest, even one major mass casualty event in a city from an exchange would be enough to tip the economy and cripple supply chains etc, and a limited/full exchange doesn't necessarily need to incinerate the whole world in order to completely collapse it
Eh I think we're more resilient than that. It'd be shocking, yes, but in the end I don't think it would be that much of a disruption from the point of view of the species.
Er...the 50MT device was a cold war dick measuring stunt, not the demonstration of a practical strategic weapon. But, yeah, we (the US) don't even build 1MT devices any more, because 1) we have to fit them into submarines and bombers where size and weight (and economic) requirements limit yield, and 2) we figured out pretty quick that due to diminishing returns on destructive footprint, bigger bombs were pretty much a waste of effort (and produced other side effects like more fallout). Among other gotchas, you're constrained by the cube-root law; ten times more yield is not anywhere close to 10 times more destruction on the ground.
So, since we saw first-hand what devices of ballpark 20KT yield did to an urban environment, numerically most of the operational US nuclear weapons are around 100KT (margin of error and all that)[1]. So, yeah, better targeting, smaller warheads, yada yada. Still one-shot/one-kill for an entire city and the surrounding area. I mean, McNamara could handwave with statements like "optimistically, only millions dead" (paraphrased), but I don't think that kind of thinking has aged well.
That said, things are not worse because the Big Three have Big Bombs (or don't). It's because the strategic landscape has changed. One of the big 3 is lead by a guy who thinks nuclear weapons are just like big hand grenades or something and that negotiation is a zero-sum game. Another bit three leader is maybe just holding on to power by his teeth (or not...who knows) and came of age in the 'nuclear war is winnable' era. And there are more players at the table. Israel has nukes. North Korea. France and the UK. And India and Pakistan. South Africa had them before, and could again. And Iran will get them at some point, sooner or later. And we're apparently going to give the Saudis all the required tooling and expertise required, though there's apparently a firm pinky-swear no weapons will come of it. So we aren't looking at a 'simple' US/USSR cold war, with some Chinese spice in the mix. We have regional power, some of them not known for long-term stability, some with extremely volatile regional situations, with the ability to knock over the apple cart.
So what is the escalation/deescalation path if, say, KYI has a real bender one night and decides that NK nukes Seoul? Or Tokyo? Or what if they just pull a June 1950 and march all the way to Pusan conventionally? Do we nuke Pyongyang? All their nuclear facilities (the ones we know about)? Or glass over the whole place? And what then does China do, us having set off a nuke in their literal back yard on top of their Little Buddy? Under such circumstances, I do not expect the current administration to take a measured step back and say "we need to think this through...".
Uncertainty. That's why a lot of us (who lived in the Cold War) think things look a little shakier than usual.
[1] To head off the inevitable "well ackshually...": Yes, the big players still have big bombs. I haven't been involved in this area in a while so things have probably changed a bit, but we still have some of the big boys in the 300KT+ range sitting on Minutemans for old times sake. I assume the Russians still have a bunch of their 1/2 to 1MT devices in silos. And the Chinese were pretty proud of their absurdly large 4MT+ devices, supposedly still in service.
Exhibit A for why we need to rewrite sovereign immunity laws and get them out of union contracts, at the same time professionalizing how DUI is enforced. If we made the punishments like they have in Europe, the incidence would go way down.
these dramatic and colorful massive specimens are perfect for an art museum, but as a recovering mineralogist I feel like the true beauty of the world of minerals in Earth is shown on the microscopic level, where you can see both the incredible order and incredible randomness of the (mostly) crystalline solids that make up minerals. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_section
There is an idea that minerals are these inorganic substances but fully two thirds of all minerals identified were originated from direct or indirect interaction with living things on Earth. In fact a recent hypothesis holds that minerals have evolved since the formation of the solar system very much like living things, getting more and more complex via selective processes. See https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/research/mineral-evolution
This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically any societal function for decades without any actual data.
