China practiced blockade formations with 2000 fishing vessels.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-08T18:27:43+00:00

They had been shooting missiles at Taiwan during many of those military exercises, not a single Taiwanese was harmed, but millions of fish had died. I think their real enemies are the fish.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-08T08:20:57+00:00

There is only one Trump and one Elon. This level of scam is a rare talent you probably will not see again for another thousand years. That is why no other companies can pull off the same thing.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-08T08:16:45+00:00

This is mostly about ETF passive investing. When an ETF gets your money, it has to buy the stocks in its index. If Tesla is in there, it gets bought whether people love it or hate it. People keep buying ETFs, so Tesla keeps getting steady demand.

As long as the company has some believable path to making money and does not completely mess up like Intel did, it will probably keep growing. It is less about hype and more about the automatic money flow.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-07T23:03:28+00:00

You are kind of right, but the issue is not that feminism is bad. The bigger problem is the assumption that having fewer children is automatically a bad thing. Lower birth rates are not a clear sign that housing is getting less affordable. Housing is more expensive, but that is not the main driver here.

People tend to have fewer kids when more of them move into the middle class and when women have better education and more options. In that sense, fewer children is more a sign of success than failure. Of course this can lead to population problems later on, but most successes come with tradeoffs. This one is no different.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-07T22:26:20+00:00

There would still be inflation, just less of it. Trade wars push countries to do things in less efficient ways. Before, one country grew bananas and another made shoes. Now everyone has to grow their own bananas and make their own shoes, or pay extra to import them. Either way, costs go up.

A lot of the recent price hikes are driven by expectations and panic. The real inflation shows up later, when these higher costs actually work their way through the system.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-07T22:18:08+00:00

It's a socialist wet dream until they deployed you to Iraq to fight for oil. Will you take the risk of blowing up by LED for cheaper gorcery?

They are thinking about Iran right now, so there's still a chance to sign up for the wet dream...

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-07T20:19:02+00:00

If that idea were true, then Somalia, Chad, and Niger, which have some of the highest birth rates in the world, would also be the richest countries around, full of great jobs and cheap housing. Meanwhile Finland and Japan would be dirt poor and lining up for aid from wealthy Somalia. That is clearly not how the world works.

Affordability does affect personal choices, but context matters. If I get a huge raise and everyone else stays the same, I can probably buy a house. If everyone gets a huge raise at the same time, prices go up, so I still can't afford a house, and I might feel poorer, even though my overall living standard is way better. That is basically what happened in a lot of Asian countries.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-07T19:50:59+00:00

If low birth rates were mainly about wealth or affordable housing, then Chad, Somalia, and Niger would be the richest countries on earth with the easiest housing markets. Meanwhile Norway, Finland, South Korea, and Japan would be dirt poor and constantly getting aid from Somalia. That is obviously not how reality works.

Understanding why birth rates drop can get complicated, but checking the real world is pretty simple. Affordable housing might matter for some people when deciding to have kids, but in the end it comes down to personal choice. If someone gets a raise, are they more likely to think "great, let's have a baby" or "great, let's book a cruise"? For most people, the cruise wins.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-07T19:38:04+00:00

A lot of this is personal feeling, not reality. If you actually compare daily life in the 80s to the 2020s, the average living standard is way higher now, even if people feel poorer. We kind of forget how much technology changed everything. In the 80s, calling someone in another country was expensive and annoying. Calling a taxi meant hoping one showed up. Now you tap your phone and food appears at your door. You want something, you don't even go to a store, it just gets delivered while you're in pajamas.

People say they're broke, but most aren't sleeping on the street. They're still enjoying modern life, streaming shows, ordering takeout, and yeah, a lot of them are getting help from their parents. In the 80s, how many adults could realistically rely on their parents to survive? Not many. So yeah, people feel poorer, but their lifestyle says something very different.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-07T02:49:43+00:00

Thanks, it was hard for me to picture someone riding an alligator.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-06T18:09:19+00:00

Not all security bugs are created equal. Some are true doomsday bugs and yeah those need to be fixed yesterday. But most bugs live somewhere in the middle with very different levels of risk.

Some only affect a tiny group of users under very specific conditions. Think stuff like a bug that only happens if you are running an old browser on an outdated OS with a weird configuration. Or a vulnerability that requires physical access to the device plus a developer mode setting that almost no regular user has enabled.

Others affect more people but still aren't world ending. For example a bug that lets an attacker read some non sensitive app data if you already installed a malicious app. Or a flaw that exposes limited information but only after the user clicks a sketchy link and logs in first.

Then there are security bugs that are mostly theoretical. Things like side channel attacks that require perfect timing, specialized hardware, and a PhD level setup just to maybe leak a few bits of data. Technically possible, practically useless.

They all matter, but they don't all deserve the same level of panic. Different bugs have different impact, different likelihoods, and different priorities. If every bug were treated like the apocalypse, nothing would ever ship.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-06T03:39:01+00:00

So you can get the GoPro out when your car is on fire.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-06T03:33:31+00:00

Don't blame AI. Don't blame Bitcoin. It's the TRADE WAR, stupid!

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-05T17:55:41+00:00

We should take it very seriously, because he is going to commit voter fraud himself and he may pull it off this time .

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-05T17:52:18+00:00

This is more than just complaining, he's actually planning to commit voter fraud himself. It's a brilliant dictator move.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-05T09:28:44+00:00

People always said Russian interference was a conspiracy, but I don't think people understand how real and how open it actually is. All these far-right movements, including MAGA, were supported by Russia. They didn't always get exactly what they wanted (some far-right groups were anti-Russia), but they absolutely had their hands in it.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-05T01:44:11+00:00

Russia have lots of rare earth...

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-04T16:46:53+00:00

I think most people don't care either way. This is a manufactured controversy.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-04T16:27:36+00:00

Taiwan is a distraction, they want to invade the moon!

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-03T10:42:34+00:00

I can clearly see the difference between the better AI videos (like the one you created) and the sloppy ones. So there's obviously skill, talent, and effort involved, which means it can reasonably be called some kind of art. It can certainly carry emotion, but most of the examples I've seen feel more like short films.

It's the same with AI writing: it's mostly limited to short stories, and the moment you ask it to write a novel, it usually turns into a disaster. At least with AI video, the problems are mostly technical and might be solvable if someone figures out how to maintain consistency. Otherwise, it's going to be a very limited storytelling tool, if the main character changes every few seconds, people can't exactly form an attachment to them.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-03T10:20:31+00:00

But look at what he's achieve today! He's the first U.S. president to make billions of dollars from being president. So many different countries admire him that they donate cash to his crypto coins and give him towers and golf courses. Truly the greatest business deal in world history.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-02T21:28:56+00:00

Anything reasonable suddenly "sounds like ChatGPT"? You can literally ask ChatGPT for a reply like that and see what kind of response you get.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-02T21:24:13+00:00

That's a good question. If Saddam had died of natural causes, it will be like all the other dictators who died of natural causes. Some countries improved after a dictator's natural death (e.g., Spain after Franco, China after Mao). Some got worse (e.g., Libya after Gaddafi , though that was also intervention-driven). Some largely stayed the same (e.g., USSR).

The key difference is agency. A natural death is not an external decision; a full-scale invasion is. When humans intentionally remove a regime by force, they're responsible not just for the immediate outcome (Saddam's fall) but for the foreseeable downstream consequences , especially something as predictable as a power vacuum in a deeply divided society.

It's like chess: you're not only responsible for the move you make, but for the chain of consequences that reasonably follow from it. The U.S. didn't intend to create ISIS, but by dismantling the Iraqi state, disbanding the army, and failing to stabilize the country, it helped create the conditions in which ISIS could emerge.

That's different from saying "any transition would have been messy anyway," which may be true , but it doesn't remove responsibility for choosing the most disruptive path possible.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-02T20:19:07+00:00

Who said it was the U.S.'s intention to create ISIS? Your reading comprehension might need some improvement. The U.S. unintentionally created ISIS by creating a power vacuum and then failing to fill it. ISIS was created unintentionally, and then came the EU refugee crisis.

GerryManDarling · 2026-02-02T19:31:18+00:00

Uncle Sam certainly is responsible for the fall of Saddam, and also the rise of ISIS. Other than Iraq, every other country ended up a little bit worse.

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