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I love how Lara Croft's first instinct when coming across a sarcophagus is to immediately open it and then magically gain ancient knowledge. I bet no one invites her to funerals anymore because every time they try to lower the coffin, she just shows up and opens it, suddenly becoming proficient in Microsoft Excel.
I read an interesting post on Substack, because I followed a link to another post in a comment, and then I went to the blog archives... The latest post, the post before the one I liked, and the post after one, all were about re-litigating the COVID mask policy, vaccines, social distancing, media, contact tracing, misinformation research, and so on. I clicked on a post out of morbid curiosity, then I went back and I clicked on another, and... well... all these arguments made sense, superficially.
Sometimes an alternative version of my life flashes before my eyes, one in which I had never been in the papers or interviewed for TV, one where I hadn't personally attended an event that was later summarised in the paper by a reporter who hadn't, and so on. In that version of my life, I didn't think about the difference between bacteria and viruses, and I hadn't read any papers about SARS #1 and the flu and attitudes towards masking in Japan and Hong Kong. In that version of my life, when confronted with statements about vaccines and masking, I wouldn't have said "putting masks on toddlers is total BS" or "six feet of distance in an unventilated room won't help" or "school closures will probably have a negative impact, and that impact shouldn't be evaluated by epidemiologists" or "even if the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, you can do the math about the fatality rate of COVID and the risk of long COVID". In a world where I hadn't already discounted a lot of what I read in the papers and saw on TV, I would have felt betrayed.
But in this world, in the world I live in, I looked at COVID in February 2020 and thought: "Slightly more contagious and slightly more deadly than the flu is a big deal, even though it's just a couple hundred cases here right now. It will rise exponentially. It will become a big deal. Any attempt to stop COVID in its tracks that works would require international coordination and, if successful, would look completely draconian and disproportionate in hindsight. So we aren't going to do that."
And then in March I thought "The whole business about flattening the curve is miscommunication, borderline deceptive. They want to keep the area under the curve the same and make it wider, but most of the reporting is acting as if they want to make the area under the curve smaller, and the whole thing will be over in two weeks! What is going on?"
If I had honestly believed in "two weeks to flatten the curve", or if I had honestly believed that masks don't work at all in March 2020, then my world view would have been shattered. But it wasn't, and I just kept thinking for myself like I always had.
Same here, but I'm not sure that I really blame people who over-updated on this one issue. Speaking only for myself, the perfidity of journalists was a known quantity going in, but the same behavior from public health officials was a surprise at the time.
So yeah, I'm glad to have a measles vaccine still, but I now evaluate everything from the WHO or the CDC through the same lens of "they're probably lying for clout" that I previously had not applied to those domains.
I read an interesting post on Substack, because I followed a link to another post in a comment, and then I went to the blog archives... The latest post, the post before the one I liked, and the post after one, all were about re-litigating the COVID mask policy, vaccines, social distancing, media, contact tracing, misinformation research, and so on. I clicked on a post out of morbid curiosity, then I went back and I clicked on another, and... well... all these arguments made sense, superficially.
Sometimes an alternative version of my life flashes before my eyes, one in which I had never been in the papers or interviewed for TV, one where I hadn't personally attended an event that was later summarised in the paper by a reporter who hadn't, and so on. In that version of my life, I didn't think about the difference between bacteria and viruses, and I hadn't read any papers about SARS #1 and the flu and attitudes towards masking in Japan and Hong Kong. In that version of my life, when confronted with statements about vaccines and masking, I wouldn't have said "putting masks on toddlers is total BS" or "six feet of distance in an unventilated room won't help" or "school closures will probably have a negative impact, and that impact shouldn't be evaluated by epidemiologists" or "even if the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, you can do the math about the fatality rate of COVID and the risk of long COVID". In a world where I hadn't already discounted a lot of what I read in the papers and saw on TV, I would have felt betrayed.
But in this world, in the world I live in, I looked at COVID in February 2020 and thought: "Slightly more contagious and slightly more deadly than the flu is a big deal, even though it's just a couple hundred cases here right now. It will rise exponentially. It will become a big deal. Any attempt to stop COVID in its tracks that works would require international coordination and, if successful, would look completely draconian and disproportionate in hindsight. So we aren't going to do that."
And then in March I thought "The whole business about flattening the curve is miscommunication, borderline deceptive. They want to keep the area under the curve the same and make it wider, but most of the reporting is acting as if they want to make the area under the curve smaller, and the whole thing will be over in two weeks! What is going on?"
If I had honestly believed in "two weeks to flatten the curve", or if I had honestly believed that masks don't work at all in March 2020, then my world view would have been shattered. But it wasn't, and I just kept thinking for myself like I always had.
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Socialism, as opposed to capitalism, is all about improving the standard of living for the Volk.
Therefore, if the average person within the borders of a socialist nation-state experiences an improvement in living standards, it is clear evidence of socialism's success. If there isn't an improvement of living standards, it is because of foreign interference or simply western propaganda aimed at de-legitimizing the socialist project, so it is not worth discussing further because any discussion is a concession.
However, if the nation-state is not socialist, an improvement of living standards is clear evidence of stealing from the third world through imperialism, because the norm in capitalism is obviously a continued decrease in living standards. The sole problem with western social democracy is the fact that it can only improve living conditions through imperialism, after all. It's all about dialectics.
Couple thoughts; where are you seeing leftists who donβt harbor rage and hostile intent towards anyone who would describe themselves as βthe Volkβ?
If a nation is socialist, that doesnβt exactly stop it from doing imperialism and pillaging weaker countries for the benefit of their own core.
Leftists and falsifiers / modernizers of Marxism have absolutely no problem insisting that politics must be done "for the people". "Volk" is simply the German equivalent that has now become taboo because of Nazi associations, but the underlying thought process, of politics across class lines, is the same.
If a "socialist" nation (i.e. a state in lower-phase communism) experiences the material pressure to exploit proletarians in or outside its borders, it is definitionally not socialist.
It was a dictatorship of the proletariat that caved to material pressures due to failed European revolutions to implement something approximating state capitalism, and degenerated from there. Socialism (in the scientific sense) cannot be implemented in one country. This is why internationalism is so critical to the proletarian movement.
See, I thought that OP was just doing a deadpan parody, given that it's a perfect example of a Russel conjugation. Yet apparently they're serious? Amazing.
Can you recommend some non-nonsense works on Egyptian language?
Not really! The only person I remotely trust when it comes to Egyptian is Marwan Kilani, but that's based on lectures of his I attendedβI haven't had a chance to read much of what he's published (apart from his book about group writing, which I don't care about), but I have to assume it's decent.
In 2023 he organised a class on Afroasiatic for the Leiden Summer School and taught the Egyptian bit of it, and he provided a bibliography and a couple of PDFs (mostly about Coptic), and they're representative.
One of those PDFs is Loprieno's Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (1995), and the CUP Linguistic Introductions are generally pretty good IME, but if you compare e.g. his reconstructed phonology of "later Egyptian" to that reconstructed in Peust's Egyptian Phonology (1999) or Allen's Ancient Egyptian Phonology (2020) (no PDF of that, though I could dig one up), you end up with three significantly incompatible systems, and it's not because the field has actually made any progress in 25 yearsβpeople just refuse to engage with each other's work in any meaningful way. And later Egyptian is the easy one! We have a ton of data from Coptic and Greek just sitting there.
Honestly the only serious way to do Egyptian as a linguist is to start with Coptic and only then get into Middle Egyptian, but I'm not particularly willing to do that and neither, apparently, is anyone elseβCoptic, like Syriac, is the domain of theologians who learn it as one of their bonus pack linguae sacrae to sit on and do nothing with, and everyone else just acknowledges how important it is (hence all the Coptic PDFs Kilani provided) and then basically never touches it.
Something that is probably obvious at the βSun Tzu wrote about thisβ level or close but I only really put together recently after reexamining the start of the American Revolution is that, on some level, once you put weapons on the field, control of βyour own troopsβ is tenuous. Which means that on some level, by just sending/showing up with a group of armed men, you are accepting the possibility of them attacking like poorly trained dogs, or alternatively the possibility of them turning around and running away. The politicians, bureaucrats , and their officers put them on the field and that might be the last decision they actually have control over.
Video games and tabletop games seem to generally elude this problem, instead simulating instant communication and complete control of units the player directs. Itβs fun in a game, but reality is that soldiers are entirely capable of ignoring orders or executing them in stupid or half-assed ways.
Anyways the whole βdragons attack stuff the riders didnβt want them toβ problem characters in House of the Dragon face is not unique to fantasy dragon riders. You brought a semi intelligent weapon to a fight, and it is not necessarily going to do exactly what you want it to.
This is so facts and funny enough the only time I ever observed insolence/desertion in war games is a literal amrev war group on Roblox that I was a part of some time ago.
Since the armies in the game were made up of teenage boys (lore accurate) it was RIDICULOUSLY difficult to get people to listen or to follow orders, and when the KD ratio came into play during seasonal matches, a lot of folks would flee or stay back from the action to avoid dying. Sure, their lives werenβt actually on the line, but even from a commanding standpoint (which I was in as an officer at one point) it was damn near impossible to get everyone on the same page and keep them there, especially when fellow officers were barking out contradictory orders over each other.
When communication was not clear, and the fighting players werenβt listening/confused, it caused us to lose big time. This meant that officers 1. Had to plan ahead of time as to who was allowed to call orders and who wasnβt, and even go as far as to strategize against certain regiments.
And 2. Drill and discipline actually became really important events for us to host, not only to gain skill but build a relationship with our lower ranking members and gain their respect.
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I'd be pissed as fuck if I were Slovak and could have been named Jakub (yes pronounced like that one) but instead my stupid chud parents named me Robert
I get so mad when I meet Romanians named, like, Edward. You should be named something cool like Mihai or Nicolae. I hope your parents feel everlasting shame.
important reminder that most people you follow online are significantly lamer than you think they are including me. and if you feel insecure comparing yourself to someone online: DON'T. theyre probably also lame and weird. most people on the internet are
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Precursors: The New Left and the Days of Rage; Civil Rights Law; "political correctness"; Bill Clinton and Sister Soulja; 90s as the nadir of radical racial politics
The Opening Skirmish: Racefail '09; liberals vs. progressives; metastized LiveJournal drama; Vox Day; an aside about NRx as the Jungian shadow of the SJWs; what do we call this thing, anyway?
The First War, Gamergate: Pulling aside the curtain; "it's about ethics in gaming journalism"; Jezebel as metonym for online feminism; antipathy between creators and consumers; polarization and radicalization; alternate content ecosystems
Trump Years: NRx gives way to the Alt Right; how to win the presidency but lose everything else; the normies start to notice; COVID, Floyd, and J6
COVID and Biden: COVID as Gamergate for normies; Musk and Twitter; is it really an "alternate" content ecosystem when that's where everyone goes?; World War T and the backlash to the backlash to the backlash; I guess we're calling it "Woke" now; an old man falls down
Vibe Shift: Trump redux; culture war stalemate; proto-pillarization and the shape of things to come; AI?
You frequently hear NGO's cite something like "with $40 billion we can solve world hunger" thereby making all hunger Elon Musk's fault for not just selling 5% of his stock or whatever.
These figures are not true. GETTING FOOD TO PEOPLE is a very hard question. Do they have ports and infrastructure? Is an army besieging them? Will you just give them some cash that immediately becomes inflation as everyone is bidding for the same food?
So I told Claude "assume every Democratic voter gives 10% of their income" as some sort of maximum level of altruism we could get from America. What could actually be done with this money to effectively address world hunger? What would it actually cost.
The results were interesting.
After noting that you'd probably have 1-2% loss just gathering all the money, and calculating something like $7 trillion for Democratic incomes: (Claude)
The plan, at maturity (~year 6+), allocating ~$700B/yr β though honestly the program's real ceiling of useful spend is ~$250β350B/yr, and I'll say what to do with the rest at the end.
Tranche 1: Cash transfers in functioning-market countries β $80β120B/yr. As discussed: 50β60% of the undernourished, decent conversion efficiency, gets better as farmers respond. Cap per-country flows at roughly 3β5% of recipient-country GDP to keep Dutch disease manageable. This is the workhorse, not the interesting part.
Tranche 2: Hard logistics buildout β $60β100B/yr for the first decade. This is where the money buys the most starvation-avoidance per dollar over time, because it raises the elasticity of Case 2 permanently:
Port berths and grain terminals: Beira, Djibouti, Lagos/Lekki, Mombasa, Port Sudan (when accessible). A deepwater grain terminal is ~$300Mβ1B. Build 15β20.
Rail rehab on the key corridors: DjiboutiβAddis, BeiraβMalawi/Zambia, TAZARA, DakarβBamako. Rail moves grain at 1/5 the cost of trucks. Budget $30β50B total over a decade β this is the single highest-leverage line item in the whole plan.
Storage: a network of regional silos cutting the 20β30% post-harvest loss. Losses avoided are free food; this may beat buying grain outright dollar-for-dollar.
A owned-and-operated truck fleet with maintenance depots, because renting surge capacity in the Sahel at crisis prices is how WFP burns money now.
Tranche 3: Agricultural productivity β $50β80B/yr. Sub-Saharan cereal yields are ~1.5 t/ha vs 5β8 in developed agriculture. Fertilizer subsidy/distribution, irrigation (Sahelian river basins are massively under-irrigated), improved seed, extension. Slow β 10β20 year payoff β but it's the only line that eventually makes the program unnecessary. Historical precedent is the Green Revolution, which was cheap by comparison and dwarfs every food-aid program ever run in lives-not-lost.
Tranche 4: Strategic grain buffer β $20β30B/yr steady state. Physically pre-positioned stocks (5β10M tonnes) in regional hubs, plus options contracts on futures markets. Purpose: when a famine breaks, ship in days instead of months. The 2011 Somalia famine killed ~250k people largely in the window between early warning and food arrival. A buffer collapses that window. Buy counter-cyclically to avoid moving world prices against yourself β at $300/tonne, even 10M tonnes is only $3B of grain; the cost is warehousing and rotation.
Tranche 5: The guns question β $10β30B/yr, and here's the honest analysis.
Armed convoy protection works in one narrow band: banditry environments, where the threat is opportunistic looting, not a party to the conflict. Somalia 2011β12 (AMISOM-escorted convoys), some Sahel routes. Hired escorts β realistically contracted regional forces or a UN-mandated protection mission you fund, not Blackwater β can plausibly keep corridors open there. Budget it, it's cheap relative to the food it protects.
It fails where most famine deaths actually are, for a structural reason: in Sudan or Gaza, the besieging force is an army, and starvation is its policy instrument, not a side effect. Your escort force either loses to the army or has to fight it β at which point you are a foreign belligerent in a civil war, your entire operation loses humanitarian access everywhere else on earth, every host government expels you, and Tranches 1β4 die to fund a war you probably don't win. Mercenaries scale to protecting shipments from thieves; they do not scale to breaking sieges. Nobody has ever broken a siege with contractors. Breaking sieges is what NATO-tier militaries do, occasionally, at costs and risks outside this budget's ability to purchase.
The workable substitute for force in Case 3 is uglier: paid access. Negotiate corridor deals, pay "taxes" to armed groups, accept 20β40% diversion as the price of the 60β80% that gets through. This is what actually happened in Somalia, Syria, Yemen. It partially funds the war. It is still usually positive-expected-lives versus purity. Budget $10β20B/yr for it, run it through a firewalled entity so the diversion doesn't contaminate the rest of the program's access, and accept that this tranche's efficiency is ~50% by design.
One more instrument that outperforms both guns and bribes in Case 3: buying the politics. $5β10B/yr in payments to neighboring states for border access, port use, and pressure on their client militias moves more food than any escort force. Kenya, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia all have leverage over adjacent conflicts and all have prices.
Tranche 6: Nutrition-specific β $15β25B/yr. RUTF (therapeutic food for severe acute malnutrition, ~$100/child treated), micronutrient fortification, school feeding. Extremely high value-per-dollar, absorbs limited money.
Phasing: Years 1β2 you can usefully spend maybe $80B (mostly Tranches 4, 6, and starting 2's procurement β infrastructure has its own absorption limit; there are only so many dredgers and rail engineers). Years 3β5, ~$180B. Year 6+, ~$300B ceiling.
The residual problem: you pledged ~$700B and the mission maxes out around $300β350B. The gap either goes to adjacent development (water, health, roads-in-general β defensible mission creep), gets banked as an endowment so the program survives donor fatigue (Dem-voter compliance will decay; year-10 collection will not be year-1 collection, and an endowment converts a fad into an institution), or the pledge shrinks to 4β5%. I'd endow it. The endowment is arguably the most important tranche: every prior surge of famine funding (post-2008, post-Live Aid) evaporated within five years, and the infrastructure tranches only pay off if the institution outlives the enthusiasm β house-cat sovereignty, where the whole edifice depends on someone still filling the bowl in year twelve.
What it achieves: starvation-death outside active sieges effectively ends by year ~7. Chronic undernutrition falls substantially over 15β20 years via Tranches 2β3. Siege famines continue at maybe 40β60% of baseline mortality, reduced by buffers, bribes, and bought neighbors, not solved. Confidence: portfolio structure and the guns analysis, confident. Dollar allocations, probable to guess β the honest resolver is running the first $80B and reallocating annually based on what the price-transmission and diversion data show.
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So it sounds like Claude is saying it would cost $350 billion a year, for several years, and beyond that more money is not immediately doing good.
Also this involves trusting Claude's plan, which can go wrong in 100 ways.
But I feel this IS a good OOM (order of magnitude guess.) When you think about someone seriously claiming to stop world hunger, they aren't being practical if they say it could be done for significantly lower than this.
The part of it that I'm really skeptical of is Tranche 2 -- the infrastructure build-out. By definition, the sorts of places that need this are places with very low industrial capacity and state capacity, which makes me suspect that you can put $100B into them without getting the infra that you need -- or if you *do* put that infra in, it will collapse/get looted/decay the moment your back is turned.
This relates to the "guns" question further on down. I half-suspect that if you do manage to get your trains and grain silos built, you're going to need a small private military to protect it. This works, and it's probably affordable, but it has terrible optics, and the people who would be most mad about it are precisely the people you're expecting to pay for it.
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