One crucial difference is that they recommended that as the lesser of two evils, arguing it would be better to make the first strike before the USSR had a huge arsenal to strike back than to wait for an inevitable more devastating war.
So far, it seems they were wrong in thinking a nuclear war with the USSR was inevitable.
Does it have to be /pol to be pissed off that one's country loses almost a century in its development due to communism and post communist transition period. Stalin killed more of its people than Hitler did. Mao's body count was bigger than probably all of the war casualties combined. And pol pot was the most charming communist of them all in relative terms. Oh and North Korea.
Eastern Europe bore the brunt of the war's damage and was left for 50 year under the oppressive boot of the stupidest ideology the world has ever known. And poorly executed to boot.
Who knows. At the time, maybe it would have stopped decades of cold war.
For thousands of years, the culture with the upper hand in technology has always wiped out everyone else. So when US had the bomb and USSR didn't, there was a short window to take over the world. Even more than the US did.
Maybe the US conspiracy theory people wouldn't mind a 'one world government' if that government was actually the US.
And unipolar worlds seem to be more peaceful than fragmented worlds. Fragmented worlds get WW1.
I don’t think the US understood how far ahead the Russians were in bomb development at the time. There wasn’t really a good window where we had it and we knew they didn’t where the enmity was so bad that we would have wanted to strike first.
The US also didn’t understand how much work had to be done to get their weapon onto an aircraft, etc - so the worst case scenario always turns out to be too bad to consider rationally (MAD)
Perhaps it was convenient for everyone involved to have an obvious enemy. Say the US wiped out the USSR... then what? Hegemonies are not known to work well without some bogeyman to conquer or rally against. The USSR was a very convenient enemy for the US, and vice versa.
Well we know he was wrong as his entire premise was based on war being inevitable - all the logic flows from that one wrong assumption.
Also trying to take out supposed capabilities before they are built - doesn't mean the Russia people are suddenly freed from communism. ( cf Iran ). Also there is a premise that it's somehow a one off event. When in reality you'd have to constantly monitor and potentially constantly strike ( cf Iran ).
Then what about banking & finance pre central bank era are you nostalgic for?
Because if the current system favors the bankers, the previous system sure as hell favored the bankers. Is it the bank runs?
I guess I should say this is all academic now, since we're about a month an a half away from Weimarizing the dollar lmfao. We've been kicking the institutional legs out from the stool for a while and we will discover the virtue of an independent central bank whether we like it or not.
Bankers have been a problem as long as there have been banks with fractionally reserved deposits. The Fed just stabilized the appropriation of surplus value by the banking system through the issuance of credit. There is nothing independent about it: it will preserve the large banks come hell or high water, and soon enough we'll get both.
I would prefer a social credit system (not the Chinese kind, the other kind) where the money supply is managed for the public good via a citizens dividend tied to the productive capacity of the economy, coupled with making gold buying/selling tax free as a savings (and monetary disciplinary) mechanism.
I have the advantage that this system will never be tried, and therefore I can never be proved wrong.
Ok. We'll see how that shakes out in a year or so. Most folks in the west have never lived in a country where a dictator controls the money supply. It's REAL easy to shit talk the US or even european central banks are when you have no idea what the alternative is.
How about we go the other direction: how to stop being bored by other people.
Most people are fascinating if you engage with them in good will and solidarity. That doesn't mean you have to like them or support every opinion they hold or behavior they exhibit, but just take them as they are and figure out what they are interested in.
I have been surprised to find that many "boring" people are, instead, shy and are much more interesting than the extroverts that are usually labeled as such.
Actually this is the best advice I've heard to not being boring yourself. If you are earnestly interested in the other person's interests, wants, dreams, what have you, they will find you interesting.
This post is slightly different about not being bland/non-weird, which is another thing--be yourself out loud.
I know I do edit what I say to new people that I meet, because they probably actually aren't interested in my several deep but narrow interests--I can tell by my Youtube feed. I am unapologetically weird and totally fine with progressive disclosure. I suppose if we have common interests but they act similarly it would be a missed opportunity--I should give more signals, the equivalent of wearing my fave band T-shirt, like mentioning things regularly in casual small talk.
If anything I've edited my own life down for simplicity and focus: family, friends, some aspects of work, and a handful of lasting interests. If you don't care what other people think, a lot of things just become unimportant.
"Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people." -John Adams
if the religious part bothers you, substitute "willing to forgo benefits on principle rather than economic and utilitarian calculation, despite recognizing the prisoners dilemma of doing so"
The context of that quote is interesting. It's a pep talk to the militia. It could be summarized as "Our country is new and so it doesn't suck yet. Go out there and be honorable."
He didn't intend it as political analysis, but it nonetheless makes a fine warning: "But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations [...] this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World."
He's pretty clear that this had already affected every other country, and it seems like he expected us to go that way eventually. I don't think any set of laws will govern a people who would rather defeat their opponents than live together.
A religious corollary: "You cannot legislate righteousness", or to your point, "you cannot legislate [willingness to forgo benefits on principle rather than economic and utilitarian calculation, despite recognizing the prisoners dilemma of doing so]"
It's not math, it's pressure down the chain of command - you had to be outsourcing or at least trying to. Same as now - you have to be trying to "AI" and report improvements as this is what everyone wants to hear.
screens are for output, buttons (and toggles, knobs & sliders, they all have their strenghts) are for input. Voice is also good for input but should never be the only (or primary) way of interacting with important functionality.
automakers are slowly figuring this out but, unfortunately, the move to electric may retard this realization because "high-tech"
Voice is only good for languages which have broad support, and for native or almost-native sounding speakers. Anyone with an accent or speaking a language with broken support due to few speakers or just models not heavily trained on hates voice commands.
I don't have a heavy accent but as a non-native speaker still do have an accent in English, and I hate the failure modes of voice commands when it misinterprets something since it is much harder to correct. I actively avoid voice commands just due to this 1-5% of failures that are extremely annoying.
glad to see some physical buttons, but there aren't nearly enough of them and they aren't differentiated enough
the emergency lights button should be colored red and elevated because it needs to be interacted with in high-stress situations
temperature should be set with a slider rather than a toggle switch because then a given temperature selection becomes spatially consistent and selecting max-hot or max-cold is instant and obvious
and so on
all in all better than expected and shows that we are moving past the "everything is an ipad" phase of civilizational development
I don't see why a slider couldn't work with "Auto".
Setting the temperature where one end is minimum, the other is maximum, and between them you have a choice of degrees.
Activated vents would probably be better kept as buttons instead of being on a slider, I might want to use the floor vents at the same time as the defroster.
Fan speed (imo) should be on a knob, like a volume control. It would be fun to see it move, like a motorized pot on a receiver.
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