You don't even have to be a billionaire to make people believe whatever thing you say. In the 10s you can just say the most amateurish take on a subject imaginable and get a highly educated audience to nod along if you tell them you make $200,000 a year optimizing ad delivery for google.
> Youtube charges $10 per month and doesn't produce a single video.
This is like complaining that your fridge takes money to run even though it produces none of the stuffs you put in your fridge. Serving video is enormously expensive especially if you let practically everyone use your platform as permanent storage for videos that will never be watched and will never generate ad revenue. There is a reason why no real competitor to YouTube has emerged and the alternative platforms that do exist target professional content creators even more than YouTube.
> They should quit it with the Shorts though, nobody likes those
No one on this website likes them, sure. The number of likes and comments some of those short videos get suggests that there are enough people who like them for YouTube to keep pushing them. They just don't tend to get very vocal about it on a nerd social media.
> China suffers more from these conflicts than the US.
You are missing the even bigger picture. Look back a few decades. The 1973 oil crisis was not just a temporary inflationary event, but the starting point of various technological and political investments that sought reduction in reliance on oil — engine efficiency regulations, nuclear power in France, early research into solar energy. The current war will likely have a similar effect. Suddenly you can't rely on imported fuel any more. And if you look around for alternative energy sources, Chinese solar and batteries and EVs suddenly look a lot more attractive than two months ago. And this is before you factor in the rest of the world reassessing their relation to the US and their confidence in the competence of US military and diplomacy.
You think you are describing the Bolsheviks, but your description is equally fitting for those who want to abolish human labor without providing people alternative ways to make a living.
And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.
Not to even forget how unstable that sort of living is. A few bad seasons from various causes could really affect population. Just look at history of famines. It kinda works when you have industrialised agriculture in other places to fallback on, but without that it is very risky in long term.
One crazy thing I recently heard that put this into perspective is that Livestock makes up approximately 60% to 62% of the world's total mammal biomass. Combined with humans (approx. 34%–36%), domesticated livestock means humans and their animals constitute roughly 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, leaving wild mammals at only about 4%.
I suppose Frontier living doesn't necessitate hunting, but the amount of readily available meat and animal products would have to drop very low.
This is the small solace I take when it comes to climate change reducing arable land - almost all of our crops are grown to supply a luxury product (meat), so if we need to, presumably we could just eat the grains we grow directly, instead of turning them in to animals first.
I assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too.
I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern life (housing, transport, food - I'm not even including healthcare here) become impossible for someone on the median income to have, then what, exactly, are they supposed to do? Find a nice corner to die in?
We sorta tried a miniature version of this on a few acres in Ireland and while it was tough (and we were always reliant on the outside world, we didn't literally homestead), I'm not sure it wouldn't be an improvement for a non-trivial percentage of people at the bottom levels of society.
But, of course, land is owned (thanks to enclosure, which took a common asset and allocated it to specific individuals), and this all falls apart when you or a loved one have a serious disability or illness.
I appreciate the nuanced reply and yes, I do mean that you will not be able to produce as much food as you currently can nor will you be able to do so as reliably as we currently can.
And while you might be able to do it in Ireland — one of the only countries in the world with less people than two hundred years ago — it will likely be impossible to the billions living in far more densely populated countries.
I think maybe there is a "frontier living" fantasy that is resting on the hidden assumption that you can bring your modern tech stack with you, minus the civilization that it relies on.
If I squint my eyes and imagine really hard, I can see living off the land, supported by small fusion reactors powering powerful AGI computer clusters, highly advanced 3D printers capable of producing all the physical support structure of life.
AGI + Power + Magic 3D printing and maybe one can live "off the land" with "civilization and all of human knowledge" hiding inside this portable tech stack.
FWIW this isn't even remotely close to what I was thinking - I definitely had no notions of AGI or 3d printing involved. You can do a lot with hand tools if you have plenty of time and a forgiving environment (access to water and trees for timber).
Water for one. It was very risky as things like droughts quickly killed you. It was also very risky as someone moving upstream of you and shitting could see you dying from dysentery very quickly. Water is in far worse shape now because of how deeply we've pumped out aquifers and how poor we've left soil conditions in many places.
Next is amount of people. Current human density is supported by antibiotics. Take away them and we quickly fall back to around 1900 population density (1.6 billion roughly). And not even internal antibiotics, external antibiotics like chlorine for cleaning and water purification.
So those are the setups for population collapse. When population starts collapsing this way it generally overshoots the numbers pruned because of war/disease. We won't fall to 1.6 billion, it's likely to fall well below 1 billion.
They can manage it. Cheap drugs, distributed by the government, can handle you from suffering and ensure you will not participate in any kind of anti government protests. Also they can add birth control additives and reduce the population significantly.
> Solar is just as liable as petroleum infrastructure has been.
Oil and gas infrastructure is full of choke points like pipelines, port facilities, storage facilities and large, concentrated refineries that supply entire country's worth of fuel. There is no central choke point in a solar based grid.
> Iran targets solar plants in the gulf states instead.
A drone exploding in a solar plant will take out what, a couple hundred solar panels? The rest will keep working once you blow the dust off.
You set one oil storage tank on fire and it takes care of everything else in its vicinity.
Not to mention solar can be truly decentralized. You can just buy a solar panel, plug it in your outlet and start generating electricity. You can turn every house into a solar power plant if you want and an enemy will have to bomb every house to get them offline.
> Maybe Iran wants to twist the knife, sends submarines to target solar supply chain networks directly either in shipping at sea or to be closer to shelling or missile striking mining or production facilities.
Iran will totally just go to war against china to prevent more solar panels from being made, yeah.
>There is no central choke point in a solar based grid.
The distribution becomes the target, not the generation. I agree with most of the other things you're saying, about how I can generate a small amount of electricity on my own if I buy a PV system. That's irrelevant, however.
Destroy oil supply and there is a crisis in 12h. Destroy solar supply and there's a crisis in... 20 years? It'd actually be much sooner but the point is that it's much less urgent that oil.
Sure but certainly you understand that's far more complex to do than taking out a single oil refinery next to your country that affects the whole work and is the only reason a country like Iran has any power at all?
They can just target the Suez Canal and wreak similar economic havoc. They can target the Temple Mount if they wanted to really see the world rise up and burn. It isn't the only accessible linchpin even in the region. It is just perhaps the closest one to hit when throwing a stone.
I wonder where the gulf states are going to end up.
They have tried hard to build economies that aren't just fossil fuel exports. Tourism, trade, finance, luxury living for rich foreigners… but everything they have tried is contingent on peace in the region. I doubt foreigners are looking forward to layovers in Dubai now there are Iranian drones heading their way.
Maybe future travelers will not see two trunkless legs in a desert, but empty condo towers and abandoned super cars still loaded with labubus.
They're done. They export oil/LNG, import food, invest the proceeds in the US companies/treasuries and brand themselves as logistics hubs + safe havens for the global rich. It's all out of the window now.
They also spent decades sending money to the US to buy influence and protection, which instantly vaporized the second a missile was launched their way.
The big story I think is how handily they took out billions of dollars of US radars and that these air defense systems are not up to the task (we actually already knew this from Ukraine, but media worked overtime to ignore this fact). In a way, all this supposedly "superior" US and Israeli tech (at least on the defense side, offense is a different story) has been exposed. I do think focused engineering efforts could close this gap, that was needed already 4 years ago.
The war in itself? For sure, but if a million dollar rocket saves a billion dollar radar system against a 50.000 drone, it still seems working as intended.
That doesn't say 10+ radars have been destroyed. It says radar sites have been attacked 10 times across 7 locations in 6 countries, with some damaged and some destroyed.
Plus a couple videos of fixed radomes getting hit by drones
Defending against ballistic missiles is well known to not be perfect, even against Iran's lest sophisticated missiles it's very difficult. But the high end missile systems are worth trying. The main problem is the lack of cheap drone interceptors which has been a blaring siren since Ukraine war started that the US neglected by not treating it as an emergency.
C-RAM radars - at least one US embassy was hit with an elcheapo drone as well, rendering it useless. Thats a legit problem and was only possible because they took out most of the important ballistics radars first.
How would a THAAD in Jordan help stop drones in Iraq? That's not the only radar they operate.
The C-RAM was in Baghdad, the high end radars hit were in the other gulf states.
The CWIS is probably the best anti-drone tool the US has but they have far too little of them and can get overwhelmed. They should have listened to Ukraine.
Isn't this a different thing? I tend to assume when someone is talking about ballistic missile defense, they are thinking of ICBMs. A House of Dynamite is an example of that. But that seems substantially different from the regional missile defense that seems much more effective. Mach 5 is pretty fast, but Mach 25 is considerably faster.
The lay public is almost certainly unaware that perfect, nation scale ICBM defense is fucking impossible. At least in the US.
People in Israel are probably more accustomed to what a "High but not perfect" interception rate means.
But people in the US are just really dumb about things. They probably think it just needs "Enough money" or "A breakthrough" as if that's just a magic spell you can cast to get around physics.
However, modern anti-ballistic missile defense systems are effective enough that if you spend enough money you can defeat, with high probability, half to most of the incoming weapons. It involves firing many many interceptors against each incoming threat. It does not scale.
This is why it is generally deployed as a way to blunt, possibly not even defeat a North Korean nuclear attack. Nothing more.
Shorter range ballistic missiles suck. They still have the crazy high velocity terminal phase, but they are way cheaper to produce. I don't think it's possible to defend against them economically.
Cluster munitions that have between 1 and 10 kg of explosives are great against the infantry in the open field, not so much against population with proper level of shelters and an advanced warning to get there.
This is not mostly true: Israel's anti air defense works surprisingly well against Iran's attack, the issue has always been 2 things:
Who has more missiles to throw?
And the Patriot is still top class in it's designed goal: shooting down ballistic and cruise missiles.
The second big thing is that no one has designed air defense to take into account effectively slow moving artillery pieces that have the same maneuverability as a missile.
Because that is what drones are and what has been the biggest glaring problem for but the USA, Israel and Russia (the gulf states both use Russian and US anti air defense).
The aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics - they have basically no chance against hypersonic and other fast ballistics, especially ones with active measures (flares, maneuvering - there was a really wild one from a few weeks back). And there's a number out of this conflict as well. The are still great at shooting down jets, however. Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point. I think a lot of people are in denial about this due to a combo of Hollywood narrative and ideological reasons, but the Russians math very good - it's reality. But even so, those are not the right systems for fighting drone attacks - nobody really has it together with that. Both of these are solvable problems, it's just a lot of hard math + piles of money.
And that success rate comes after significant improvements to the Russian weapons and finesse. They were much less effective early in the war.
Cat and mouse is always a factor in war. The patriot wasn't very good when it was first introduced and took some refining to become the gold standard, which it still is.
It still works very well against planes too, reaching out and downing EWACS aircraft at the edge of it's range.
They were neither designed nor expected to have 100% defense rate, but 50% is lower than expected. 75% isn't great either.
> aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics
Decades-old Patriots shot down Russia's newest "hypersonic" missile.
> Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point
What? Source? You're describing the systems that have been getting floored the world over. Why do you think nobody is placing orders for these anymore?
There’s a number of videos of US and Israeli air defense quite literally failing at intercepts. You can see the entire trajectories and stuff. Some from US bases, other in Israel but they are trying to censor them.
"It’s worth pointing out that Hezbollah has managed to get rockets right down to the south of Israel today – and that is unprecedented. Never before has Hezbollah managed to get rockets so far south into Israel."
Ballistics are much harder to shoot down period there is not a single system that has 100% success rate, Ukraine reports around 42-77% success rate[1].
Hence why army folks were so alarmed by Russia/China developing and having ready prototypes that can go hypersonic.
To me the way Kagi curates its small web directory always feel contradictory to the spirit of independent web publishing because it seems like you have to submit entries through GitHub — a highly centralized platform owned by one of the largest tech companies.
kudos to you for figuring out a decentralized solution.
I hope platforms like these find a way to attract people outside tech circles. I looked at around a dozen recommended sites and only two of them isn't the personal website of someone who works in tech and writes mostly about tech, which gets boring rather quickly.
There is a world of non-tech bloggers writing stuffs about history, culture and nature who would likely never learn about this project simply because they are not in the right social spaces. I hope there is a way to have them in the ecosystem too.
It doesn't seem very hard to implement in your own site, so it might gain some traction? It's not super-complex, I understand it is some sort of interconnected spin on webrings, which are still somewhat popular among small websites.
If anybody wants to find truly random small websites, I recommend using Wiby (search engine). It has some neat stuff.
> It doesn't seem very hard to implement in your own site
Depends on how technically sophisticated the author is. Many of the blogs I was thinking about were not written by people familiar with web stuffs. They are hosted on managed hosting services like wordpress.com and blogspot, or on hosting providers with streamlined services that require no technical skills to use. Setting up this tool may very well be beyond what the authors are comfortable with or capable of.
Assuming you consider services like Wordpress and blogspot outside of the small web, people advocating that domain refuse to acknowledge why those services are successful to begin with.
If being part of the small web requires technical expertise, it will always be limited to tech minded people who also happen to cook and play guitar.
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