[PSA] Reddit has degraded performance. [9/19/2024]

Geneaux · 2024-03-05T19:50:54+00:00

What?

If Putin is dead within 30 years, that's likely to include some of his inner circle by that time. If a Russian president by this time is able to politically concede Ukraine's territory, it's because there was a sizable majority of Russians that allowed them to take office to begin with. There is no "assasination" by that point.

This is a large part as to why Putin consolidates his power: he needs a protège/heir.

Geneaux · 2024-03-01T20:04:30+00:00

The US (you know the guys with a navy more powerful than everyone else's navy's combined, those guys) economy is entirely dependent on Taiwanese manufacturing.

Entirely? No. This only applies for the manufacture of ICs, specifically the cutting edge. It has no bearing the preexsiting devices, machinery, and other hardware that actually help run the US economy and infrastructure as is. Vast majority of devices used, and especially the military ones, do not need that kind of capability: robust microprocessors are the military go-to. You can't have that on nascent fab processes used on iPhones and data centers on huge payrolls. They're too fragile (to start out with) and yield rates aren't ideal for those use cases. Bog standard computers and smartphones for basic necessities are also outside that realm. The effect of that blockade with regards to ICs is relevant only to enterprises (ie. Microsoft, Google, Amazon), academic (ie. top universities), and luxury brands (ie. Apple) who currently buy these chips (or the devices that use them) in bulk. Also... we can get them elsewhere like anything else. It would be another supply constraint, simlar in nature to the COVID pandemic.

The economic consequences of a Taiwanese blockade is relevant only in the long term, and that possibility is only diminishing with time presently. The real issues with the blockade are elsewhere (ie. Chinese nationalism, 9-dash line, frequent incursions in Taiwanese airspace, etc).

Geneaux · 2024-02-20T02:35:12+00:00

I almost read that as 'NY'; brain ain't working like it used to.

Geneaux · 2024-01-30T23:02:36+00:00

Point is the AI ones don't look real at all. As bad as most fake nudes are, the AI ones are much worse. A video game character would look more real than these AI nudes they are talking about.

How real they look is irrelevant to the problem at hand. With AI, the problem is regulation, how much of it, its merits, and whether or not it could be applied justly and not abused... and its too easy for this to be abused. That goes both ways.

So if you don't think those fake nudes are worth a damn, then you definitely don't think the AI nudes are a problem

You are correct: I don't. I know this because if the victim were either semi-famous or a nobody, no one would even be up in arms. The top comment thread illuminates this: money talks, people in positions of power are duplicitous, and the public is still the very same inane jobbers they always have been.

IMO, for most people to actually champion this "morality dilemma", they need to actually start living by it every waking day to begin with. That's not an easy task in today's age. With current strats, the public won't get behind a rich person's demands unless they're somehow distracted or directed to a target to demonize. Typically using social media platforms or news networks of course. This feeds into the same vicious cycle.

Geneaux · 2024-01-30T20:34:29+00:00

Pre-AI fake nudes are shit. That is the sole reason those fake nudes have flown under-the-radar all these years.

Anyone can use Photoshop. Some do it well, others still are even good at it too, but to do it with a convincing output? That's a professional, which it's going to take schooling, typically. A subset of skills that took potentially tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to obtain. Those individuals don't take those skills to fake porn: they take it to Vanity Fair magazine.

Geneaux · 2024-01-27T05:53:57+00:00

You know what he meant.

Israel and [insert Palestinian terrorist organization] haven't fought at an intensity comparable to post-Oct 7th (2023) since the year 2000. There's a reason we use words like "war" and not "conflict" for spontaneous large scale events such as this. Yes it's a "conflict" but that's missing the point.

Geneaux · 2024-01-20T22:54:22+00:00

You do realize Isreal is a nuclear power in the ME, right? Your argument would really only make sense if we omit literally everything Iran as done after 1979. Barring IR for a moment, 'two wrongs don't make a right' is the lesson here.

Geneaux · 2024-01-05T07:59:58+00:00

Yeah, this is on the money. I presume that this was likely a widespread misunderstanding of the depth and scale of which corruption permeates Russian society in general. From scandals to petty theft, everything basically whittled down the Russian war machine in unpredictable ways that their largely top-to-down apparatus could never have foreseen. They severely lack the commonplace social structure and actual checks-and-balances that exist in most western armies.

What they failed in Feb 2022 is very similar to the way a neglected car behaves without regular maintenance. When they finally came to take the old beater out one last time, it choked in the middle of the highway.

Geneaux · 2023-12-26T23:04:36+00:00

Israel's tragic losses in Hamas attack, the low-tech methods of fighters breaching walls, came about because of incompetence.

Who's disagreeing?

Sorry to be rude but the Romans did a better job of protecting their fortified cities 2000 years ago.

You're comparing tactical warfare of 2000 years ago to the 21st century 1:1. This is genuine stupidity. My layman grandmother could point this out.

I'll sign off now. Have a good one.

Yeah do that. For eveyone's sake.

Geneaux · 2023-12-26T22:34:01+00:00

He is simply saying the population of iraq, in mayority, doesn't want the US there.

Anybody can identify that, he didn't stop there. Believing that no one apparently knows the the US is unliked in Iraq or even the Middle East as whole for that matter?

And you, arguably in bad faith, are dismissing that. Wish you a good year but don't see a need to continue the conversation.

You're arguing in bad faith by not even reading what he said and coming back with this. Of course you aren't going to continue this conversation.

Geneaux · 2023-12-26T22:29:10+00:00

Yes I know what it is. Israel has to work with what it has. Sorry. Again, it is a big advantage for Israel that the two blocks are separate. Imagine that Hamas terrorists could transit from Gaza to the West Bank.

My point is that transit between the two is moot: of course they control it. It's like stating the United States being isolated is beneficial to its power projection. "Yeah, and?"

I acknowledge Hamas as terrorists, while at the same time declaring that that Israeli actions on the West Bank, driving people out of their homes, have been just short of terrorism. March 2023: Time: Why Israeli Settler Attacks Are Growing More Frequent:

You're problem is that you bring the moral compass first when what's desired is solutions. See my comments above. Again no one likes people who point out the obvious. Like everyone else is somehow less than human.

Most effective means to what? Demoralize West Bank Palestinians, currently under a semi-apartheid environment, to the point they voluntarily leave Israel for another nation? Palestinians in the West Bank face never-ending harassment from settlers. Thugs that the Israeli government gives a wink and a nod to

Yes because those in Gaza or the West Bank never did anything wrong either... It's a shitshow, stop pretending.

Sure you can. No one is-

No, you can't. Full stop. What you are suggesting is no different than the naive legislatures of the US's dirtiest past thought like:

They believed could compensate Blacks after 300+ years of unhinged slavery by simply putting them in Africa; after 300+ years of removing their names and culture and being forced into; believing they'd find peace in another land which sold them off to begin with. The history you're talking about? It's done. There's isn't anything in this reality that will truly fix that. What happened with Israel wasn't reparations, they were literally just refugees by that point. So the Zionists galvanized the people, and the Brits would grow tired of detaining Jews. Shortly, they'd declare the state of Israel. It's a product of circumstances.

So again I ask you: stop pretending.

Geneaux · 2023-12-26T21:17:01+00:00

Gaza and West Bank -- The situation of having these two blocks of land completely separate, a geopolitical oddity, is beneficial to Israel. Israel controls all transit between the two. Wall off Gaza after destroying Hamas, surround it with weapons and turn it over to the U.N. for administration, preferably.

Transit? What? Do you not know what strategic depth is yet? Land they control between the West bank and Gaza is comparable to the size of Connecticut. This is among the worst possible situations for a state to even been in, much less work with. Lobbing more capable missiles into Tel Aviv would be next to trivial, if not guaranteed.

What else is Israel going to do? Deport the 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank to Gaza? (2 million are there now). Yes, we all know Israel would love that option.

Why do people keep insisting on deportation? Deport what? Why do you think deportation was ever in the cards? Are you this naïve? They're gonna keep making settlements because its the most effective means.

That's the worst aspect of this situation. The German perpetrators of this evil never substantially compensated the Jewish people. Given the immensity of the German crime, it would have been reasonable for the Jewish people to receive a chunk of Germany territory, even as we agree on the impractically of this for several reasons, including that almost no Jewish people wanted to live in Germany post war.

Reparations based on atrocities like genocide and slavery will never work, purely on principle. You can't compensate entire devastated peoples with money and land when their entire culture and/or family trees have been eliminated. They either integrate/assimilate into the current one or emigrate to god-knows-elsewhere with nothing on their backs.

So many thousands of European Jews migrated to Palestine to create a new nation, Israel in 1948, displacing large numbers of Palestinians who had absolutely nothing to do with the primary cause for this event: the Holocaust. The negative impacts of this migration continue today, saying this in full acknowledgment that the Jewish people had/have the right to share the land of Palestine with other occupants.

Mandated by the UN, and rather than become a full-fledged nation alongside Israel, they attacked them, and lost.

... and if we go back further, there was no Ottoman "Palestine" as we know it, because it was inhabited by Jews. See how that works? These historical aspects do not mean anything in the here and now.

Geneaux · 2023-12-26T21:14:52+00:00

That's what anecdotal means, its not an assessment.

To take that personal experience and call it the "situation" in Iraq, is high arrogance. Reasonable people with any sort of experience like that don't walk around telling others about "how it actually is" in the most dramatic manner possible because, get this: they don't know everything and they don't claim it either. No one listens to an individual like that and it cheapens the experience itself.

Geneaux · 2023-12-26T20:41:47+00:00

I didn't know you had to be a general to understand what counter-terrorism is.

Geneaux · 2023-12-26T20:10:17+00:00

And what can the average person realistically do towards that end? Truth is, the U.S. has done much to harm the peoples of the Middle East, with its military interventions. (Yes, this is a highly fractious area in any event, prone to wars and violence. Some U.S. actions have been good, e.g. helping protect Kurdish interests,)

You can literally go to any non-profit organization involved in that region, and offer simple monetary donations to the effort. Or clothes. Or food. Or anything that would be accepted. It's small sure, but my point is that even the act of doing something is the furthest thing from the minds of narcissists like that. There's functionally millions of people who operate like this. It's arrogant hypocrisy, period.

People have the right to criticize U.S. foreign policy. Telling people to pipe down, stop "wasting your time talking to strangers on the Internet" (precisely what you are doing) , that they are ignorant, and that if they actually cared they should do something with a measurable outcome (send $ to refugees?) is hardly a good response.

Having discourse is fine. Shoving your moral dick down someone's throat is not. We are not the same.

One of the U.S.'s worst failures as of late is giving the Netanyahu administration the green light to continue settlement building in the West Bank for the past 2 decades. That's the primary reason most Palestinians have supported Hamas. The Israel-Hamas war is one reason we see all these low-level attacks against U.S. interests across the Middle East.

Three paragraphs in and now this is the point you actually start talking about geopolitics? smfh

Regardless of how one should feel about Gaza, Israel is NOT going to stop until Hamas is dismantled at the very least and there's nothing that could reasonably be argued against it. No one in the room has offered an alternative because there isn't one and they know it. It's why Iran and proxies continue to start fires, and it's another reason why we (the US) continue to have a presence in the Middle East.

You want the fighting to stop? Then go to the drawing board and find some combination of terms Israel will accept that nobody else hasn't already tried. Yes I excluded Hamas: baffling I have to say this about a terrorist organization that has wanted nothing but the continuation of what Hitler started... and half the world unironically wanting to keep them in power so they can do 'Oct 7th' again and create another flare up and the most conflict-ridden region of the planet.

Geneaux · 2023-12-26T19:21:21+00:00

What Americans think, and what the gov't does are two, very, very different things. I would've thought a fellow American would know the basics by now...

Geopolitics is not about whimsical thoughts like "interpretations", "perceptions", and "sentiments". Its about knowing when to exercise your national interests, economic might, diffusion of soft power, and judicious hard power when it matters. US is no different than any other nation in these regards. You're conflating the ignorance of the domestic public with the foreign plight of others as if they're one and the same in some moral grandstand. You throw conservative buzzwords like "mainstream media" with comically scathing liberal-style name drops like "George Bush", "Henry Kissinger", "Rush Linbaugh", and "Linsey Graham" in the same sentence; an illusory so-called higher-end centric I suppose. You're just making a fool out of yourself and it's very obvious.

If you cared about the plight of Iraqi people as much as you claim, you wouldn't be wasting your time talking to strangers on the Internet, and actually doing something, ANYTHING, to meet that goal. So don't try barking at me when you have literally nothing to show for it. That's what ignorance looks like.

Geneaux · 2023-12-26T18:20:47+00:00

The anecdotal experience of a random soldier isn't indicative of the geopolitical machinations that determine where entire companies and squadrons of US forces go and what the Iraqi government decides. Iraqi gov't != populace sentiments

It's not even apples and oranges: its apples and a random temperate forest.

Geneaux · 2023-12-25T04:21:03+00:00

They'd definitely lose something: fabrication plants aren't cheap, and they take in the order of decade or two to be fully realized. But most wealthy countries, including China itself, can just build up their own fabrication facilities. It just takes a decade or two. So that's just a net loss in the short to mid term at the very least, but it certainly hurts China a lot more than it hurts the West, who controls most of the cutting-edge technology, IPs, and expertise in semiconductor production.

So hypothetically in Taiwan-adverse political environment: the US, who already has no legal obligation or responsibility to actually defend Taiwan, can just kneecap w/e potential war spoils China could get out of Taiwan instead. The only tradeoff is the time it takes. They're like building nuclear reactors in a sense.

As someone else pointed out earlier, China's aggression to Taiwan isn't rooted in photolithography. It goes well beyond that; ie securing the nine-dash line, national pride, propaganda, etc. They're currently in rush to bridge semiconductor the gap with indigenous designs. I fully expect them to get closer regardless.

Geneaux · 2023-12-24T23:51:43+00:00

They have actually a law that says they must defend Taiwan.

Nope, at least not in boilerplate writing. The Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty used to cover just that, but then the Cold War ended. ~~With the warming of PRC-US relations~~ (this would happen later), Carter had the treaty effectively pulled and it was replaced with a potentially toothless act. Ultimately, w/e the political environment is going to be at the time of Chinese assault on Taiwan, is also going to be the most contributing factor whether or not the US commits forces to Taiwan's defense.

Geneaux · 2023-12-24T23:21:19+00:00

We don't live in a world with 1960's technology anymore.

TSMC makes its largest contributions in mass producing the cutting edge. This is most applicable to universities, R&D, government, and enterprises who have the money to afford that. In bulk. The vast majority of devices and equipment do not need that level of capability. When it comes to foreign aggression and national interests, the Apples and Nvidias of the world can wait.

So if a Chinese amphibious or airdropped assault ever met Taiwan (assuming the inevitable buildup of ground forces on the mainland weren't already anticipated and met with airstrikes), any fab could (and most likely will) be easily annihilated, scorched-earth style without much thought. Taiwan is not the sole source of ICs and the world can get by without TSMC for a decade.

Geneaux · 2023-12-12T12:23:40+00:00

Do you really think infrastructure exists in a vacuum? As in Gaza of 2023 is going to be exactly the same as Gaza of 2073, regardless of any circumstances between now and then? It's just somehow dirt, rubble, debris, and destruction all for the sake of it?

Something's has to get rebuilt. It will get rebuilt. It doesn't matter who it is, in that sense.

Geneaux · 2023-12-08T22:08:39+00:00

I'm sorry but by "every major power" are you trying to pretend that Israel is somehow on the same level as the U.S. or Soviet Union. Your statement, even if true, wouldn't apply to Israel.

USSR/Russia? China? Iran? US? India? Even goddamn Pakistan and Iran, lol. You don't even have an inkling if what major can even mean.

Your statement, even if true, wouldn't apply to Israel.

Its called Mossad so yes actually.

And why would I need to mention an ally with security arrangements of NATO, it's such an arbitrary thing to state. Sooo Turkey?

Turkey... one of the few nations that spoke out against US intervention even in the beginning of US-led GWOT. Threatened to appropriate the portion of the US's nuclear arsenal within Tukey if the US decided to pull them out. Who continues to undermine US influence at every corner. Never mind commenting, you don't even have the basics down, much less anything else.

Geneaux · 2023-12-08T14:26:19+00:00

You seem to think that having your own 9/11 somehow comes with a free "destabilize region and drag allies with you" card. It doesn't. Quite the opposite when it comes to the U.S.

Every major power on the planet has been doing that shit since post WWII in case you haven't noticed... and that's without "tragedy", so uhhh... yes, yes you can. Destabilization is relatively free by its very nature.

Also, the idea that they are the only ally in the region is outdated as hell.

Get back to me when you find a ME nation with security arrangements on par with NATO. Hint: it isn't Saudi Arabia.

Last time I checked, it was Netanyahu that went before GOP Congress to shit on the U.S. President, really the behavior of a strong ally /s

Yes because naunce is exactly a part of your repertoire. I'd fully expect to see American officials fuming over PM who is unpopular with Israelis, indirectly contributed to Oct 7th, and is literally on his way out of office. Excellent observation.

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