And I don't think the reason things aren't done isn't because they aren't economically viable, but because there's no interest in doing them. Could somebody start a megacity out in the middle of nowhere? I mean probably, and it might even be a good idea, but things like this require a visionary to get them going. Electric cars prior to Elon were glorified go-karts for virtue signaling hipsters. It's not that they were inherently viable, but nobody had really shown the path forward yet.

And here there's already major interest and money behind it, so getting started won't be a problem. And from that point, the path forward will become ever more clear.

And this is even more likely given that negotiations for the end of the war started on February 28th, 4 days after the war began! Furthermore, the large convoy was completely inappropriate for actual military purposes and Russia didn't even have the logistics in place to keep it running. It makes no sense from a military perspective, but is 100% logical from an intimidation one.

I do think the airborne troops were a genuine decapitation strike attempt, as is tried in most of every war. It rarely works, but there was a chance it would (and in such a scenario you'd want a draft of the 'victory speech' written, much as we wrote a public obituary for the Apollo astronauts before they embarked for the Moon). But even if it failed, it also plays into the intimidation.

And those negotiations would have indeed almost certainly succeeded if the West didn't jump in and encourage Ukraine to "just fight". And I think the West did this expecting to rapidly inflict a 'strategic defeat' on Russia. Nobody got their quick victory, and instead we ended up with a real war that I don't think anybody thought would happen.

I'm not sure exactly what questions you're asking me about Russian enlistment that I haven't answered. Ukrainian military sources put Russia's mobilization potential at 20 million. That seems like a very conservative estimate, but it doesn't really matter. Even if we roll with that, and whatever other constraints you may want to construct, it's dramatically larger than the current forces they're using, and that's point.

And calling Ukraine a genocide is ridiculous. The Ukraine War has had the lowest civilian casualty rate of any modern war, by a wide margin. [1] And that's based on the plainly fabricated casualty rates for Ukraine. After their real casualty levels are 'revealed' the civilian casualty rate will be significantly lower.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio

The Wiki on the Human Safari page gave a variety of numbers on the number of attacks. They claim around 100 strikes a day, with a peak in excess of 300. Even if you have a 95% interception rate, which you don't, that's 5+ a day getting through. If you actually are aiming for civilians you can also easily hit high population areas with those 5 that get through. Even when just targeting individuals, that'd be 200 in 40 days - and we're speaking of years. And that's also ignoring that the thousands of other disabled drones are crashing in random locations and sometimes detonating, which will also randomly kill civilians on occasion.

Trillions of dollars are being dumped into companies when frontier level open weight alternatives that are able to be run on ever more reasonable hardware already exist. It feels reminiscent of how everybody certainly knew that tulips could just be planted, but people operate under their own assumptions about the world and its future, and sometimes it can lead to quite odd outcomes.

So the most well intentioned person doing awful things? In my mind he's an awful person. But this also goes the other way as well. Imagine you're right, and the idea of getting humans into space is some elaborate scheme to somehow get more leverage over humanity. Awesome! Because it's highly unlikely such schemes will come to pass in any sort of remotely realistic way, but we'll be left with the means of humans actually meaningfully expanding into space.

I'd love to see as sharp increase in the number of evil people plotting to do good things to further their evil ends. All the 'good' people doing evil deeds in the name of some grand end that never happens is quite tiresome.

The whole point of the extended stays in LEO are precisely to simulate worse case scenarios for travel to Mars. So for instance the record for the longest time in space is held by Valeri Polyakov. [1] He spent 437 days on Mir in LEO, and then opted to immediately walk upon landing back on Earth. It was all to prove that humans would be physically capable of working on Mars (which has 1/3rd the gravity of Earth) even after absurdly long periods of time in space. In fact his first words upon return from his first (240 day) stay in space were "We can fly to Mars."

Robotics don't really work well for space exploration, because moving parts break. For instance the Curiosity/Perseverance drills are cutting edge yet have a max depth of ~2.7 inches. And traveling is even harder. On average Curiosity ended up traveling about 1 mile per year. It's all because if anything breaks, that's game over. So everything has to be done with the utmost of caution, and even then stuff constantly breaks. Curiosity's drill broke after about a dozen activations and required a team of scientists and months of full-time work to create a passable work-around when it could have viably been fixed on the ground by a human in a few moments.

This is part of the reason that we only learned in 2013 that the soil/regolith on Mars is actually extremely moist, 2-5% water by volume. A cubic foot of soil heated up gets you about 2 pints, a liter, of water. The whole plot-line in "The Martian" about having to jump through hoops to get water was correct based on the latest knowledge when the book was written in 2011. We'll probably learn more in a couple of weeks with people on Mars than we have with 60 years of probes and rovers.

I'm certain every human of sound mind is grateful for Earth. That's not a reason to not seek to expand out as far and as wide as we can.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeri_Polyakov

The second is because Ukraine is praying for a hope of having a Ukraine after the war. Ukraine had major demographic issues before the war, and is in a terminal situation now. You need to have fathers for the next generation if you want a next generation. A country without enough people will not be a country for long, regardless of land. Let alone when you're going to have social obligations towards countless individuals, perhaps in the millions, who will be crippled or suffering from the various mental and social disorders that war experience causes in people.

The rest of your post is somewhat incoherent, so it's not clear to me what you're trying to say. According to Syrskyi, Russia could deploy up to 20 million men in a general mobilization, including 5 million already with military experience or training. [2] However you want to estimate the forces Russia has deployed, it's a very small fraction of their potential in a general mobilization. And I never said what Russia has done is fine. Opposing the war does not mean cheerleading endlessly for a Ukrainian victory, especially as such is likely impossible. Russia should not have invaded, yet will benefit from the war. Such is life.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces

On top of it being plainly absurd, if you thought it was true this is not something you ever leak if you thought it were true, precisely because it might indeed provoke an invasion! Indeed, given the media's close relationship with the US intelligence community, this probably would never have been published, and the leaker would have found himself in prison. The whole narrative reeks!

Russia did not expect to end up in a war against the entire West. And there's not a chance in hell they would have realistically expected to be able to win in a war against the entire West, almost single-handedly. This war has shifted the geopolitical balance permanently (and is almost certainly what inspired Iran to fight back), and has given Russia the clout they so desperately wanted since the collapse of the USSR.

[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...

With Anthropic I think a lot of people haven't really realized the trend line of cost of "AI" (both in literal $ terms, and compute costs for local operation) or what open weight systems will do to the market in the "long run", where long run in this case means the next year or two. I don't think any LLM company is going to come out a winner in the longrun, because the price for LLM output is going to approach $0 with no chance for a moat whatsoever.

Your logic about what is a valid military target is also dangerous, because if you squint hard enough then basically everything is a legitimate military target. Since this Pandora's Box has been opened Russia is unabashedly targeting all sorts of civilian infrastructure, even including food warehouses. And that food does indeed feed the military, but I think calling it a military target because of that would be disingenuous.

People are far too myopic and led by emotion instead of their brain. When Ukraine started destroying the Wildberries warehouses people cheered without ever asking themselves what it would do to the nature of the conflict. What we're seeing today was 100% predictable, and this will not end well for Ukraine or the people of Ukraine. I feel for them, and hope they can one day find themselves with a leader who does too.

And you obviously have show flagged on, or you wouldn't be able to reach this point in the discussion.

Videos can be fabricated, misattributed, misleading, or all of the above. But the data is in the deaths. You don't have a substantial intentional targeting of civilians and only 200 civilian deaths over a period of years. It's just complete nonsense. That's an aspirational rate of minimal civilian deaths by the standards of most of any conflict. Kherson is 'hot' and had a population of 280k. Obviously most people left it since the start of the war, but by any measurement that's still a civilian death rate well under 1% in a hot zone, during an active war. That is phenomenal.

And this generalizes. Even given the obviously fabricated military casualty rates for both sides, the civilian casualty rate for Ukraine is the lowest of any major conflict in modern history, by a wide margin. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Compar...

How many do you think they would have managed to kill? 200 is quite easy to see happening from air defense mishaps, occasional mistargeting, and other such issues - but it's off by orders of magnitude if we assume a targeted campaign against civilians. A campaign against civilians would have multiples of that number per day in such a location.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_safari_(terror_campaign)

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/28/russia-militar...

Both sides instead regularly frame it, for propaganda purposes, as being targeted without ever saying as such - 'A [enemy] [drone/missile] struck a beach full of civilians' for instance. That's completely accurate, but misleading because most people think that means the beach was targeted, as opposed to 'we shot down an incoming drone that was headed for a military base and it crashed into a beach'.

The reason things look so different now is because civilian facilities are being targeted. And this isn't just in Ukraine obviously, as per this topic. Ukraine has also had this capability to completely destroy civilian facilities for years. We're only getting these headlines, and likely many more to come as winter approaches, because this Pandora's Box has been opened.

There are two big reasons for this. The first is that it's completely as it seems - we want to protect the EU. But this has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, or whatever else. It's because we don't want to see the rise or expansion of another major competitor. Imagine if Germany, China, Russia, or whoever else managed to "unite" Europe, to use a euphemism. They could viably be the greatest power the world has seen in centuries.

The other is more insidious. NATO makes an EU military largely unnecessary. This is, in some ways, a tremendous benefit to the EU since it leaves them with far more wealth to do other things with, like improve their citizens' lives. But it also leaves them completely dependent upon NATO which is largely just a proxy for complete dependence upon the US. So this creates a scenario where the US is simply irreplaceable for the EU, at least not until they have their own military. And there are occasional calls for the creation of an EU military, but they mostly go nowhere, and if they did start going anywhere the US would do everything in its power to destroy them behind the scenes, and that would probably be successful.

On the war stuff, the war has become a classical war of attrition. Both sides are fighting to the see who runs out of people first. Ukraine is fighting with something near to their max potential fighting force. They've locked all "fighting age" men in their country, are literally dragging people off the streets, and their are still facing major manpower issues. By contrast Russia is fighting with a small fraction of their overall potential having not even turned to a general mobilization. So Ukraine is losing when fighting with all of their might against Russia fighting with a fraction of theirs. This is the reason for the nonstop propaganda about Russia just about to declare a general mobilization, every single year. Without such happening, it makes it clear that this is an very one-sided war to anybody who's aware of the basic facts.

The point Pandora's Box is one of unforeseen consequences and regret. I was speaking of the decision to start intentionally targeting genuine civilian infrastructure, but as for the war as a whole it's the same story. If you take Russia back to 2022 and tell them what the situation would be today, more than 4 years later, they would 100% do it all again. If you do the same for Ukraine or the US, they certainly wouldn't have.

[1] - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/sdg_08_10/def...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_economic_crisis_(2022%E...