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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • My point is that you argued it poorly with “None of Israel’s innovations make up for the climate catastrophe they are creating.” Because, yup, they probably do. CO2 is simply a numbers game. Saying “equivalent to 36 countries” doesn’t really mean anything, because there are lots of small, global south countries with trivial CO2 output.

    From the actual study: “Our upper estimate on all pre-/post-war activities are comparable to the burning of 31,000 kilo tonnes of coal– the amount of which can power about 15.8 coal-fired power plants in one year.” That’s a much more solid number. 16 coal fired plants is . . . not nothing, but not a lot. If this was all that mattered, then Israel’s energy innovations elsewhere could easily cover it when those innovations are being shipped worldwide. Consider that China is looking towards 300 new coal plants in the not too distant future. 16 is very little.

    The moral case against Israel is much stronger than the climate case, but that’s not what you’re writing here.







  • There are several countries who gave up WMDs, either deployed or in development. Iraq, Libya, South Africa, and Ukraine. Of these, only South Africa was left alone. And to be clear, two of the remaining three were attacked by the US.

    So what we’ve done here is signal to the smaller powers that they should never negotiate away their WMDs. You’re just going to get invaded, anyway. I can’t blame smaller powers for going that way at all.

    Edit: and to be extra clear, this also applies to Iran and N Korea. They have no incentive to give up their nuclear programs.


  • By then, the Battle of Moscow already had winter blizzards setting in, and Germany would be pushed back within a month and start losing from then on. The British had already tossed the Luftwaffe into a wood chipper through the Battle of Britain. The Bismark had been sunk, and that signaled that Plan Z, a plan for building a German surface fleet that could challenge the Royal Navy, was crumpled up and thrown in the toilet.

    It may not have been obvious at the time, but in hindsight, Germany was already set to lose. The only question was how and when. Maybe Russia overruns all of Germany and then effectively controls France. Maybe there’s a negotiated peace before that happens. In any case, Germany was going to come out worse than it went in.


  • Think most historians will agree that Hitlers direct involvement in the war was a growing issue in conducting the war.

    This part has been revisited in the decades since the end of the Cold War. The problem was that most western sources were either written by the Allies or were from German generals who survived. In a repudiation of “history is written by the victors” (a phrase that should be expunged in general), almost everything known about the eastern front came from the German side of the story.

    Those generals tended to point fingers at Hitler. Everything would have been dandy if they were the ones in charge.

    Then the Cold War ends, and there’s a flood of new information from the Russian side of things. Western historians start going over the new information, and some new conclusions start to come out. Hitler did fuck a lot of things up personally, but those German generals were full of shit in other ways.




  • Being hard is the point. (That’s what she said).

    In making that attempt, we have to solve a lot of problems. How do we make a self-sustaining ecosystems where humans can live indefinitely? Can humans live that long in reduced gravity without issues? Can children be raised to healthy adulthood in reduced gravity? Is human pregnancy even possible there (probably is, but we don’t know that for sure)? Are there technologies or genetic engineering that we could use to solve the issues we encounter?

    How do we mine asteroids? How do we manufacture things in zero gravity? How do we build the Internet to handle latency measured in minutes or hours or days?

    These are all hard problems, but if they were easy, then they wouldn’t be interesting.

    And I’d say the same for ocean colonies. That’s hard, too. Not quite as hard, but hard.



  • Never got around to it, but I wanted to do a statistical search of Reddit usernames that pop up in subreddits with two or more numbers at the end. You’ll of course have lots of people with '86 or '92 because they had their birth year at the end of their username. I’m betting '88 sticks out on the bar chart. Not everyone with an '88 at the end will be a nazi, but a disproportionate number with '88 would be a hint towards what kind of people the subreddit is attracting.