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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Absolutely, a single hospital for an entire country would not work. But also, small clinics on every street corner would not work because none of them would be able to support more complex/expensive functions like surgical wards, FMRI or biochem labs. The hospital needs to be scaled so that it can support those things, but then it only makes sense for it to serve a larger community because it’s going to need a large staff and a substantial budget - so it needs to be at least locally centralized.

    As you said, there’s a critical size.



  • If everything is completely decentralized then it essentially means that each person is providing for themselves… including basic services like water and waste processing. Centralizing these things makes sense, they’re more efficient when operated at scale, and there are significant benefits to task specialization. And frankly, you don’t want decentralized medical care - you want big, modern, well-funded hospitals with the latest technology, which means centralized locations and management.

    Decentralizing services doesn’t make sense. Individual residence solar panels are substantially less productive than large-scale solar plants. Services like energy, water, medicine and waste handling should be concentrated and publicly funded - but then that means you need to collect public funds and then decide how to use them, and that means government. The larger the public project is that you want to build, the larger the government around it has to be.








  • DeWalt (aka default) tools. There’s a reason every building contractor is carrying around DeWalt drills and saws - they hold up to daily jobsite use, you don’t have to handle them like they’re fragile, you can get them dirty and they keep working.

    Don’t buy Ryobi or Black&Decker unless you know it’s something you’re going to beat to hell for one job and then dispose of. And don’t any buy high speed rotary tools from Harbor Freight.




  • This video is so disturbing, every time. Every detonation is an implied threat, a political message, a promise of violence, a show of power. Every detonation is an environmental catastrophe, a long-term cost that we’re still paying, both in the collection and refining of the nuclear material and in the detonation. Every detonation is an economic burden, human time and effort spent making a tool that only makes destruction. The US effectively bankrupted the USSR with this competition.

    The systemic cost of the whole thing is just mind-boggling. There’s really only one silver lining that I see. Humanity had access to a terrifying new weapon, the power to wipe itself out really. And we didn’t do it. At the time of highest ignorance, when very few people in the entire world really understood how bad it could be, and when political tensions were high, we did a lot of posturing but we didn’t actually do the worst we could have.

    It could have been so much worse, and we (collectively) chose not to make it that way. I do find some comfort in that.


  • It’s nearly impossible to mobilize a large force quickly, or covertly. There would be plenty of warning, especially if the US is involved because there’s an ocean in the way in either direction.

    If Western nations decide to attack Russia, I doubt the conflict will stay limited to Russia.

    • North Korea will probably support Russia militarily very quickly. They’re already supplying weapons, they have a close relationship, and they’re reasonably secure against counterattack because China would react very badly if NK were attacked directly.
    • Iran will join with Russia, but uncertain whether Iran will actually deploy its military in Europe (probably not), or take the opportunity to pursue their own goals in the middle east while the west is distracted.
    • China will probably play neutral for awhile, but continue to trade with Russia and sell them military equipment. China is circumspect, they won’t jump into a conflict for ideological reasons, though they’ll certainly quote ideological reasons in their propaganda. They will join the conflict when it benefits them and doesn’t present extreme risk. Most likely they will pursue their own goals in the south China sea (Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines) while the US is busy elsewhere.

    An attack from the West on Russia will balloon into a global conflict. It will be bad for everyone, even if it stays limited to conventional warfare.