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objectivistnerd · 13 hours
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Have you done your part to repeal NEPA yet? Because otherwise it's just posing.
Women want one thing and it's quite obvious, A large affordable interconnected North American Rail Network
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objectivistnerd · 3 days
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Always nice to be reminded that the people with bad judgment about the middle east also have bad judgment about the former Soviet space. Setting aside the fact that Russia's de facto president-for-life and other top officials given speeches about the need to cleanse Ukraine of undesirables, while Ukraine is governed by a Jewish guy who won a fair election as the opposition candidate, and focusing only on explicit Nazis rather than substantive ones -- as the Ukrainians have pointed out before, they would be happy to have check where all combatants remove their shirts and we count the Nazi tattoos, because they are way more common among the Russians, both their regular army and among the PMC named after Hitler's favorite composer because one of the founders is an explicit Nazi.
Claming that Ukraine is an "unsympathetic" party here, as LNH did, is telling about her, not about Ukraine.
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objectivistnerd · 4 days
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I don't mind people having them as long as they aren't obnoxious about it, and even like having one myself.
gender to me is like a car i dont really want one and society would be much better if it was not structured around it. but i got one because it helps me get around and sometimes its fun to make it go fast
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objectivistnerd · 4 days
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Why your criticism of "capitalism" is so tiresome
I usually disagree with criticisms of "capitalism," but there are different reasons for this due to underlying terminological confusion: you can think of this as a 2x2 matrix where the quadrants represent "I agree with your premise {yes/no}" and "the thing you are angry about is actually capitalism {yes/no}".
There is a small class of genuinely radical leftists that object to all private investment, market transactions, etc. (Category: no/mostly yes) I do not believe that the planning problem is solvable even with currently-unavailable tech such as superhuman AI, nor do I think the "people respond to incentives" problem would go away even if you did otherwise solve it. (It's pretty notable that every example that people can point to of societies that ostensibly don't display this behavior are near-subsistence economies .)
There are people who think the welfare state is too weak. "We should be more like Scandinavia." (Category: yes/no) The US is a mixed economy. Denmark and Sweden are mixed economies. We could move the dial on tax-and-transfer a lot and still be capitalist, just like Scandinavia is.
There are people who think "capitalism is the reason poverty exists." (Category: no/no? This thinking is so confused that it's hard to categorize.) The default state of humanity is poverty. Our ability to climb out of that has been dependent on productive investment. The major modernization pushes in Communist USSR and China depended on market-based exports to the rest of the world and would have failed faster and harder as an attempt at centrally-planned autarky. They were free-riding on capitalism.
There are people who think capitalism is bad because it's a impersonal system where people are transactional and don't care about other people. (Category: mostly no/no) First of all, this isn't a distinguishing feature of capitalism. Mercantilist and communist states have been equally suffused with impersonal bureaucracy. Second of all, a system where your ability to get things you need depends on your ability to pay for them and/or fill out the right paperwork is almost always safer and better than a system where your ability to get what you need depends on having the right connections and/or being well-liked (or just likeable). To actually *be* better, of course, requires certain public measures to ensure everyone has the resources and knowledge to access them; however, see previous paragraph.
There are people who wouldn't actually be able to articulate a general criticism of capitalism because their actual complaint is "the status quo gives me personally less wealth and status than I think I should have." You can probably guess what quadrant this is in.
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objectivistnerd · 5 days
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Honeytraps do not work on French spies because their wives are used to them having affairs, a television documentary about France’s equivalent of MI6 has revealed. [...] The agent known only as Nicolas, whose voice and face were blurred, says: “Defectors from the Soviet Union used to talk about the ‘French paradox’, namely if you surprised a Frenchman with a mistress by telling him, we’ve caught you red-handed with a 22-year-old called Tatyana, work for us or we’ll tell your wife, it didn’t work. “That was because he generally said: ‘Go ahead, show her, she’ll understand,’ or ‘she already knows about it’.”
(x)
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objectivistnerd · 5 days
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After Corn Pop we can't rule anything out
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bro what the fuck lmfao. funniest possible thing to say for absolutely no reason
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objectivistnerd · 5 days
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was it @argumate who described Theresa May's job as going on tv and very calmly explaining why she was about to eat a live hand grenade?
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objectivistnerd · 6 days
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Knowing what I do about dog breed pedigree collapse, you'd have to get below the biological minimums to surprise me.
I would love to say reading about all the voters who think Biden is repealing abortion rights and so dont want to vote for him is shaking my faith in democracy but that would imply this is shocking to me and I had any to begin with.
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objectivistnerd · 6 days
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I get that despite eighty years of international law on the subject most governments would rather set their own hair on fire than admit more refugees than they absolutely have to but every time a humanitarian crisis erupts somewhere in the world I am surprised at just how badly the people fleeing death and destruction are treated. Doesn’t matter if it’s their immediate neighbors or countries on the other side of the world; the universal opinion of the people who run sovereign states seems to be that they would prefer all refugees to die (preferably far away from television cameras) rather than be slightly inconvenienced.
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objectivistnerd · 18 days
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Speaking of little guys, here's Huey Long's most lasting acheivement, the Union's tallest state capitol in Baton Rouge, which Google's infobox helpfully informs me is "460' to tip". That's 140 m in real units.
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the virgin Japanese Diet vs. the Chad LA City Hall
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objectivistnerd · 18 days
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There's several incredibly easy criticisms, but I feel the concept of "corporate greed" becomes particularly incoherent when used to explain the prices of something having only just now gone up
you think corporations only invented greed last week and simply had not thought to raise prices anytime earlier?
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objectivistnerd · 19 days
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“Movies will be free after the revolution!”
Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?
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objectivistnerd · 21 days
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I have to appreciate the self-awareness.
i don't know how to argue politics. all i know is social shame
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objectivistnerd · 25 days
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objectivistnerd · 26 days
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I find the thing where only privileged people are capable of taking a break from thinking about politics really baffling because most of the hyper-marginalized people I’ve met were apathetic politically and mostly focused on putting on their own oxygen mask. This wasn’t universally true, someone of them were real fighters, but the ones who were most politically involved had lives outside of their political interests.
  also, hot take: encouraging  people to constantly ruminate the existence of suffering in order to prove that their pain is legitimate is a very good way to en masse ruin the mental health of compassionate people.
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objectivistnerd · 28 days
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Nuclear power plants have a relatively high energy density, however, it is generally considered desirable to exclude human entry into a wide radius around the plant in case of severe accident.
Concentrating solar thermal power plants have a low energy density and must occupy a large area in order to produce enough power.
Ramping up or down energy production to meet peak needs is impractical with a nuclear reactor. Likewise, for dispatchable or continuous generation, a solar power plant must include on-site energy storage.
Radiation release is not a significant hazard to solar reflector panels, and molten salt is being considered not only for solar thermal power plants, but also for energy storage for nuclear power plants, which could make them more revenue-competitive with fossil fuel power sources such as natural gas.
A combined solar nuclear molten salt thermal power station could share energy storage, distribution, and generating infrastructure, making maximum use of site resources for power generation which follows power demand, and operate continuously even during refueling outages or poor weather conditions (except when weather conditions limit availability of cooling). The solar component might add around 500MW to the nuclear plant’s output, for a gain of 25-50% in output at the site compared to nuclear alone.
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objectivistnerd · 28 days
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Which party will control Congess Houses after the 2024 US Federal Election? [Late March 2024]
I will be running a series of polls on Tumblr's predicted US election outcomes throughout 2024; this is the first round. The two houses are the House of Representatives (apportioned relative to state populations) and the Senate (apportioned two representatives per state).
Please reblog for sample size!
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