science

Technological decline

As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance.

In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving.

Our art is crap, we no longer build Cathedrals, but until recently, weapons were good and improving.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review has recently appeared, revealing that we have lost all nuclear military technology:

U.S. production of tritium, a critical strategic material for nuclear weapons, is now insufficient to meet the forthcoming U.S. nuclear force sustainment demands, or to hedge against unforeseen developments. Programs are planned, but not yet fully funded, to ease these critical production shortfalls.

This is euphemistic.  Recent attempts to produce tritium were fully funded, but failed, which failure resulted in new plans for new attempts to produce tritium, which have not yet been fully funded.

I have regularly remarked on America’s inability to produce tritium.  All existing nuclear weapons require tritium to juice their detonation, and without tritium, would produce a low yield explosion.  Tritium decays over time, and so fresh tritium continually needs to be added.  The US is out of tritium, has repeatedly attempted to produce more, and repeatedly failed.

Fully funding the Obamacare website did not produce an Obamacare website, and I doubt that fully funding proposed new tritium production facilities will produce tritium.

In the absence of sustained support for these programs, including a marked increase in the planned production of tritium in the next few years, our nuclear capabilities will inevitably atrophy and degrade below requirements.

The U.S. is also unable to produce or process a number of other critical materials, including lithium and enriched uranium. For instance, the United States largely relies on dismantling retired warheads to recover lithium to sustain and produce deployable warheads. This may be inadequate to support the nuclear force replacement program and any supplements to it.

So, our enrichment facilities have ceased to function across the board.

And, recapping my previous remarks on technological decline:

Fighter planes are getting slower, and can no longer fly as high or as far.

We need Pu238 for nuclear batteries. The 2006 New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt was launched without enough Pu238 to keep all its equipment live during the Pluto flyby, and without enough Pu238 to do its Kuiper belt mission,

Existing nuclear weapons have not received maintenance for a very long time, and it is unclear whether there is anyone with the relevant skills to perform maintenance and adequately test them for readiness.

Fusion weapons require lithium enriched in lithium six to juice them.  Enriched lithium does not decay, but the US has lost the capability to make more of it.

Attempts to build new nuclear reactors in the US keep running into indefinite delays.  To make significant amounts of plutonium 239  will need new reactors.

Plutonium 239 is the stuff used in nuclear weapons, plutonium 238 the stuff used in nuclear batteries, plutonium 240 is the stuff you don’t want because it spontaneously fissions.  You want to produce your plutonium using enriched uranium in a sodium cooled fast neutron reactor because then you get considerably more of the plutonium you want, and considerably less of the plutonium you do not want.  The US used to build fast neutron reactors, but all recent attempts to build a fast neutron reactor in the west have failed, and all existing fast neutron reactors in the West have stopped working.  The only existing fast neutron reactors that are working well enough to produce significant amounts of plutonium are in Russia and China.

If all existing fast neutron reactors have ceased to work, if all our existing isotopic enrichment plants have ceased to work, should we really believe that our existing nuclear weapons will work?

Money, “full funding”, is unlikely to be the issue.  Obama threw stupendous amounts of money at the Obamacare website, and the site did not come up.   It only came up when a conspicuously undiverse team of white and east Asian heterosexual males led by white heterosexual males took over the job.

Nuclear weapons were produced by western civilization, and since 1972 the core project of our universities has been “Western Civilization has got to go.”

Science requires a level of trust and trustworthiness that a diverse society is incapable of, and a level of truth speaking that a progressive post christian society is incapable of.

 

193 comments Technological decline

[…] Technological decline […]

Roy Elliott Hurley says:

Even at some of the lowest levels, like where I work. Management is incapable of running a business because they rely on the computer which is poorly designed. When you point out the trouble and offer solutions you are branded a troublemaker.

Yara says:

Which computer which is poorly designed?

Alrenous says:

The computer’s design is pretty okay, at least if we’re talking the Von Neumann machine, which more or less sprung fully formed from Von Neumann’s brow and has since just sort of worked.

The software apparently sprung fully formed from Satan’s anus. It was apparently designed by idiots for the purpose of making someone else suffer.

in that case (and, I fully agree), would it not be a howling success?’

Spencertown says:

Perhaps the most striking example of technological stagnation is to be found in general aviation, in which one needn’t look further than the Cessna 172, the most popular airplane in the world, which first flew in 1955; the Piper PA-28, the second most popular airplane in the world, which first flew in 1960; the Cessna 150/152, the third most popular airplane in the world, which first flew in 1957; the Cessna 182, the fourth most popular airplane in the world, which first flew in 1956; and the Piper J-3, the fifth most popular airplane in the world, which first flew in 1938.

Flight students across America are unironically training in the same airplanes as their great-grandfathers.

Dave says:

Stagnation is better than outright decline. How would you like to live downwind of a nuclear power plant, knowing that all hiring and promotion is subject to diversity quotas?

http://www.trainweb.org/mystation/RunawayLoco.txt

Read this story and marvel how the cooperation, quick outside-the-box thinking, and bravery of a dozen white men averted catastrophe. Asians are too rigid, non-Asian minorities are too stupid, and white women would collapse under the pressure.

South Korea allegedly has an average IQ of 106, yet it’s notorious for all the times a chain of bad decisions snowballed into a man-made catastrophe killing hundreds of people.

DWEEZIL THE WEASEL says:

Dave: Thanks for the runaway train story. I read it in the Reader’s Digest when I was a kid. As far as Spencertown’s comment about General Aviation aircraft, as a former private pilot, I can offer this observation: The reason student pilots are still learning in their great-grandparent’s Pipers and Cessnas is Product Liability. Those designs, while old, still function.
The General Aviation Industry was crippled by lawsuits in the early 1980’s and has never fully recovered. We have not had a Constitutional Republic for many generations, if we ever in fact had one at all. We live in a Judicial Dictatorship.

Kunkmiester says:

It’s also bureaucracy. I’ve seen conversations before about the FAA not wanting to certify new technologies, and using outmoded risk models which insist upon holistic certification of entire systems- – you can’t just certify a fuel injection system, you have to certify it on each engine with even the slightest variation on each and every airframe, making It absurdly difficult.

Yara says:

It’s all bureaucracy, but somehow it also goes much deeper than that. Anyone can fly anything in the Experimental category, and yet the technology to be found there is often not much more advanced than in certified craft. It’s a little bit more advanced – say, from the 70’s instead of from the 50’s – but not overwhelmingly so.

Go to Osh Kosh and marvel at the human sea of old white men. Where are the youth?

bryan says:

all the younger men are hitting the diversity ceiling while paying off debt for a useless education their boomer parents insisted the indenture themselves for…

TBeholder says:

Yeah, every account of the American bar rule is ugly.
But how would you solve that? Other than introducing something like Gowachin law (which is fun, but impossible for now).

vxxc says:

Need Whites to do the job.

Smart rednecks need to rise again.

Out with the others, tech and nukes too important.

BC says:

Can the fall be averted?

glosoli says:

Too late, it happened in Eden.

All that can be averted now are the consequences, which is easy through faith and belief in Jesus Christ.

eternal anglo says:

I’m a STEM student, and I’ve wanted to work on new and exciting technology since I was very young. This information from Jim would suggest that if nuclear, the sword of the Cathedral, has gone utterly to shit, then so have all other fields; that there is nothing out there for people like me except lies, bullshit and aimless Brezhnevian drudgery; and thus that I am better off learning to be a Bronze-Age pirate-mercenary than a physicist.

(Thank the gods I found Jim’s Blog.)

S.J., Esquire says:

*** I am better off learning to be a Bronze-Age pirate-mercenary than a physicist***

I read this as “Bronze-Age Pervert-mercenary”, and thought, yes, you are.

jim says:

Progress continues in some fields, but they are getting narrower.

I was expecting a gigantic biotech boom, but instead we see drug companies abandoning green field research.

Karl says:

Medicine has to acknowledge that there are racial differences. This is not allowed, so medicine cannot advance. Biotech is a broader field that encompasses more than just medicine, but I assume it also full of forbidden truths.

Ideologically mechanical and electrical engineering pose the least difficulties. So these fields decay last.

Anonymous 2 says:

As the saying goes, aspirin would not get FDA approval if it was submitted today.

Reziac says:

Combiotic (penicillin/streptomycin injectable for livestock) already didn’t get FDA approval, after being in wide use for ~70 years. The cost to recertify (whatever they call it) was a lot more than the profit from a cheap generic drug, so now your meat costs more because ranchers must instead resort to more-expensive “modern” antibiotics, or multiple types to fully replace this old standard for treating sick livestock.

peppermint says:

antibiotics are a gift of Odin, and shouldn’t be wasted on subhumans

Tom Saunders says:

When I was a youngster the old-timers would often buy Combiotic (can’t remember who made it) to self-medicate for what ailed them. There was never a problem and they swore it fixed them up just fine for lots of things from toothache to arthritis. Of course the store owner didn’t have a pharmacist license so it was always for a sick cow or horse, wink – wink. much cheaper than a two hour drive to a doctor that would charge the hell out of them and still not get them back up and to work.

Johnny Caustic says:

If you’re good at math, both mathematics and the harder parts of computer science are still genuine no-bullshit bastions of real white male achievement (along with some east Asian male and high-caste Indian male achievement). I’m talking about the master’s-plus level, not the code monkey level. Good pay, not too much politics, actual problems getting actually solved. It’s what I recommend for anyone who’s got the brains and predisposition to do it.

jim says:

True, but considerably less true than it used to be. I see all the smart people being purged out of Google.

Reflect that Obama’s team for the Obamacare website had plenty of white males on it. But it had no white males that were embarrassingly and inconveniently smarter than the browns and females.

If you are smart, women are going to perceive you as mansplaining, no matter how progressive and male feminist you are, and your boss will purge you to avoid a hostile environment / rape / sexual harassment lawsuit.

Anonymous 2 says:

The best people leaving Google one way or the other is a good sign as I see it. Google is obviously floundering with their useless yet extravagant ‘moonshot’ projects. Not to mention the hiring of many martinets and head cases to important positions. (So goes progressive utopia.)

Let them drink from their cash spigot while it lasts, and may the best people turn it off soon.

peppermint says:

Completely wrong.

You outed yourself as a faggot by acting like computer science is a thing. Computer science is an academic program created in response to market demand and will disappear without a trace the second either the civil rights are repealed or constitutional scholars ban academic certification.

Oh, but what about Anal Turing, who fucked himself by not washing his hands after playing with his child-tier chemistry set, and Donald Knuth, who wrote books of algorithms while being a professor, and that guy who published lisp as a paper because functional programming is for academics?

Computability theory has advanced as much as set theory and is only seen as important because, like set theory, midwits don’t so much expect more useful results as expect to be made fun of when more useful results magically appear.

Algorithms are important, the basic ones being in a book is a good idea, MMIX’s vector unit is revolutionary, Knuth doesn’t need to be a professor and certainly didn’t need to attend the oxymoronic March for Science.

There’s a reason no one cares about functional programming or wants xml-based makefiles which I am reliably informed is basically lisp-json by Tim the Webmaster. A computer has a heirarchy of memory starting with the registers, an instruction pointer, execution units, and runs programs. A program is a series of instructions, some of which must be run in a logical order.

Python sucks because idiots thought better editors would be able to deal with copypasting semantic whitespace just as html was becoming a popular format for email. If anything, modern editors are more annoying to get the whitespace right in than the editors of 20 years ago. C braces were invented for a reason and quite frankly Javascript’s object system is worth fighting with since it comes with braces and concurrency.

Why can’t computer scientists come up with a language that takes the best of Python, Javascript, and cxx? Because they don’t exist. There are only arrogant clowns in academia, and guys in industry who advance things as each advance is shown to be useful.

As for advancing math and physics, it’s somewhat true that intelligent men are working in these fields. It’s also true that they’re infested with women and niggers you’re supposed to pretend are capable, while those intelligent men like browbeating each other and i knew that ism as much or more than anyone else. Meanwhile, academic mathematicians are going to be blamed for Common Core, and they deserve it, because they told those education majors or math doctorates focusing on education that they’re capable of setting scientific public policy.

Is it easier for a solid dude to work on interesting things as a jewniversity than at jewgle? There’s a reason every White engineer hasn’t quit jewgle yet and it isn’t entirely because of the cafeteria food.

I have never been impressed with an academic who wasn’t a mathematician, physicist, or chemist or biologist, the latter simply because they need access to lab equipment and will put up with anything to get it, the former because, well, guys who became professors as late as 2000 were offered a different deal than exists today, and the social network and funding sources haven’t adapted to the new reality.

MIT is no longer force-meming lisp. Computer science dies when Shitavious successfully argues his boot camp cert is as meaningful as a bs cert from some college. Look for a new Imperial Science Advisor to personally fund unaffiliated researchers or whatever.

Yara says:

Why will computer science disappear after civil rights?

Will Haskell ever be cool?

>midwits don’t so much expect more useful results as expect to be made fun of when more useful results magically appear.
wut?

What is MIT doing instead?

peppermint says:

Everyone wants a lazy evaluation engine to schedule their program on all their cores. Python has concurrent.futures and asyncio, Javascript is naturally async and has threads now. The universities have caught up with the boot camps in teaching real languages like Python and Javascript, but they need to impose years of poz and tenths of millions of dollars in costs on their students for legacy reasons. No one who needs to learn in school is worth teaching and can learn on the job, except that training needs to be outsourced for firability and efficiency of talent search reasons.

Yara says:

>Why can’t computer scientists come up with a language that takes the best of Python, Javascript, and cxx?

Soothsayer, gaze into your crystal ball and divine for me the future of Rust.

jim says:

Rust has the memory safety of Python, the asynch of Javascript, and the raw iron capabilities of C++, at the cost of the compiler telling the programmer far more about the naked silicon than the programmer wants to know. This makes Rust tough to use, and means that programs in rust take longer to write. Rust is hard, because its abstractions are not just leaky, its abstractions have clearly positioned and documented holes that the compiler insists that you be mindful of and take care of. When programming in Rust, you can see all the way through the abstractions to the naked silicon.

Javascript asynch notoriously leaks. Rust’s asynch will not even compile unless you take care of the holes.

Alrenous says:

Sounds like it was designed by me.

Yara says:
Anonymous says:

What is MIT doing instead?

Teaching them how to glue libraries together using Python. And it’s become half a Javaschool.

This obviously makes peppermint less unhappy (“force-meming lisp”? Seriously, the language that you can learn in 15 minutes, instead of half a semester to just get a handle on irregular syntax and semantics?), but it’s a terrific loss that one of the 4 Computer Science undergraduate programs in the world worth that name has switched from teaching all its students, EE and CS, the fundamentals including ever more important functional programming (because of the software quality and multicore issues), into one that, if it has any focus, is on making gadgets.

peppermint says:

> oh no, we can’t take prospective engineers and teach them to make gadgets, that’s not the divine mission of MIT

peppermint says:

When you write a program, you think about what you need, memory control, concurrency, strict types, compiling, then you write Haskell and deploy to wasm with webgl.

nydwracu says:

Is Haskell a sham, or is it worth it? All the Haskell people I know remind me of sociology professors.

Alrenous says:

From the accounts I’ve read, Haskell exists for the purpose of writing papers about Haskell. It’s for impressing your friends with how smart you are.

Theshadowedknight says:

If an engineer cannot make gadgets, how good an engineer is he? Are you referring to a loss of theoretical competencies in favor of code monkeys and script kiddies? I can see that being a problem, because I see it in my math and engineering classes. People just wanting the easy way and not understanding the conceptual framework behind it.

Anonymous says:

Are you referring to a loss of theoretical competencies in favor of code monkeys and script kiddies? I can see that being a problem, because I see it in my math and engineering classes. People just wanting the easy way and not understanding the conceptual framework behind it.

Exactly. The problem is removing the requirements of the former EECS core, some of which they no longer teach in any course, that explain the conceptual framework. One of the most popular career paths for MIT EECS graduates is to learn a lot of math and then become a finance quant….

peppermint says:

…which is a bad thing because, for reasons outside of the purview of code monkeys, finance is a vastly overbloated sector of the economy, and those men should be building mars bases in Haskell instead, since mars doesn’t have an ecosystem

pdimov says:

I support the idea of Haskell programmers being sent to Mars to build a base.

peppermint says:

Theoretical capabilities like iq points, ability to read webpages and use concepts, knowing what the important capabilities of commonly used components? Especially considering that what capabilities are important is so unclear. 20 years ago people would argue about whether Java and cxx and purl used the OOPS.

Event loops, concurrency and atomics, garbage collection, object lifecycles, duck typing and type inferences, i18n and beyond ascii, the graphics unit and how to use it and platform native components, theoretical and practical benefits of compiling and installing, atomic, reversible and repeatable system management, these things have been discussed since before I was born. Whenever people manage to get it right, it will be written down on webpages anyone interested can read.

(“force-meming lisp”? Seriously, the language that you can learn in 15 minutes, instead of half a semester to just get a handle on irregular syntax and semantics?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

Grammar
Main article: Esperanto grammar
Esperanto words are mostly derived by stringing together roots, grammatical endings, and at times prefixes and suffixes. This process is regular, so that people can create new words as they speak and be understood. Compound words are formed with a modifier-first, head-final order, as in English (compare “birdsong” and “songbird,” and likewise, birdokanto and kantobirdo). Speakers may optionally insert an o between the words in a compound noun if placing them together directly without the o would make the resulting word hard to say or understand.

The different parts of speech are marked by their own suffixes: all common nouns end in -o, all adjectives in -a, all derived adverbs in -e, and all verbs end in -s, specifically in one of six tense and mood suffixes, such as the present tense -as. Nouns and adjectives have two cases: nominative for grammatical subjects and in general, and accusative for direct objects and (after a preposition) to indicate direction of movement.

Singular nouns used as grammatical subjects end in -o, plural subject nouns in -oj (pronounced [oi̯] like English “oy”). Singular direct object forms end in -on, and plural direct objects with the combination -ojn ([oi̯n]; rhymes with “coin”): -o- indicates that the word is a noun, -j- indicates the plural, and -n indicates the accusative (direct object) case. Adjectives agree with their nouns; their endings are singular subject -a ([a]; rhymes with “ha!”), plural subject -aj ([ai̯], pronounced “eye”), singular object -an, and plural object -ajn ([ai̯n]; rhymes with “fine”).

Noun Subject Object
Singular -o -on
Plural -oj -ojn
Adjective Subject Object
Singular -a -an
Plural -aj -ajn
The suffix -n, besides indicating the direct object, is used to indicate movement and a few other things as well.

The six verb inflections consist of three tenses and three moods. They are present tense -as, future tense -os, past tense -is, infinitive mood -i, conditional mood -us and jussive mood -u (used for wishes and commands). Verbs are not marked for person or number. Thus, kanti means “to sing”, mi kantas means “I sing”, vi kantas means “you sing”, and ili kantas means “they sing”.

Verbal Tense Suffix
Present -as (kantas)
Past -is (kantis)
Future -os (kantos)
Verbal Mood Suffix
Infinitive -i (kanti)
Jussive -u (kantu)
Conditional -us (kantus)
Word order is comparatively free. Adjectives may precede or follow nouns; subjects, verbs and objects may occur in any order. However, the article la “the”, demonstratives such as tiu “that” and prepositions (such as ĉe “at”) must come before their related nouns. Similarly, the negative ne “not” and conjunctions such as kaj “and” and ke “that” must precede the phrase or clause that they introduce. In copular (A = B) clauses, word order is just as important as in English: “people are animals” is distinguished from “animals are people”.

peppermint says:

Who told you that people are animals is copular?

Aryans are better is copular. In Russian you would say Aryan – better, and better are Aryans is exactly the same.

Now stop sperging out and building impossibly reduntant “natural” languages. At least AppleScript and COBOL are machine readable.

Elision is an important factor in natural language use. Marking verbs for person and number is a good idea.

pdimov says:

>Why can’t computer scientists come up with a language that takes the best of Python, Javascript, and cxx?

Why can’t scientists come up with a car that takes the best of BMW, Mercedes and Audi? Because that’s not what scientists do.

peppermint says:

Physicists don’t exist. When was the last time someone updated how fluid flow works or the properties of leather, wood and steel for doors and their hinges and handles? If high temperature superconductors existed they would exist by now and the delusive belief in them among “physicists” mirrors the belief among “computer scientists” that maybe p=np. TANSTAAFL applies to electricity and logical satisfiability for the same reason as it applies to people. The function of a physicist is to grant credentials to the engineers who actually make stuff, credentials because IQ testing is illegal, anything an engineer needs to know is all over the Internet.

Euler thought he was cool but he couldn’t even get a simple fountain to work. Gauss had more children.

Jaim Klein says:

About fluid dynamics, there is a lot of advance and modeling. No general updating, because the basics discovered by 19th Century scientists still hold. You cannot update every decade.

Every useful real world functional programming system will end up reinventing SQL, because that is the most intuitive way to process large amounts of data, which is what computers are used for.

I admit I may have field tunnel vision, but if it was possible 11 years ago to write a ray-tracer as one LINQ expression https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/lukeh/2007/10/01/taking-linq-to-objects-to-extremes-a-fully-linqified-raytracer/ which is something of a travesty, but useful as a showcase, I think it is safe to say that most aspects of programming are about generating outputs from inputs, for which a good functional approach is SQL-like syntactic sugar. I just use normal SQL for business reportng, but it is quite surprising how the bug rate is near zero, largely because I make small queries, test them, then put them together, but also because it is intuitive.

peppermint says:

data that fits in a relational database is easy to process, the hard part is linked, shared, mutable data, with concurrent access, and the question of how much space a directory in a linked filesystem takes up

jim says:

Dealing with mutable data is a hard problem. The solution is something like Git or the blockchain – immutable data with continual new labelled immutable updates – data with history, or multiple histories with inconsistencies that are then resolved.

Immutable data is immutable in that it cannot be changed, but it can be lost or discarded. Whenever process Foo has to coordinate with process Bar, they have to make sure that they are both relying on the same immutable data from the recent past. Because Foo and Bar must rely on recent data, rather than the most current data, this can result in failed transactions or discrepancies, which then have to be resolved.

These discrepancies should be resolved, and resolvable, in a quite short time, but in a distributed system, and these days all systems are distributed, it is impossible to provide a guarantee that they will be resolved within any definite time limit. Thus, everything can be be rolled back, until the one true version of the past becomes authoritatively canonical.

lalit says:

Son of a Bitch. It just hit me

What GBFM was to Roissy/Heartiste, Peppermint is to Jim.

This dude makes comments that seem retarded on the first read, but actually are not once you think about it for a bit.

Motherfucker, you’re not just an entertainer. I thought you were on this blog as comic relief to Jim’s serious theories.

What an Idiot I have been. *FacePalm*

jim says:

The court jester is apt to speak important truths.

Theshadowedknight says:

The jester is most apt to speak important truths. He is the only one permitted to see through the lies, and he reminds us of the lies we tell ourselves.

lalit says:

We all knew that Peppermint was smart, but I though he was making retarded comments in a bid to be different or he was just trolling for kicks in what was otherwise a serious Blog.

Of course his comments were entertaining and you need to be smart to make entertaining comments, but I left it at that. So I approached his comments with the mindset of looking for entertainment rather than an education as I do with Spandrell’s or Jim’s comments.

And then when it hit me, it also hit my ego as in “How the hell could I have been so wrong?” I felt a little better after realizing that someone smarter like Spandrell also thinks the same as I. I believe peppermint is banned from posting on Spandrell’s blog or something to that effect. Spandrell even made a comment to this effect on one of his posts. As is usually the case, Spandrell does not like Peppermint’s style of writing and so he rationalizes his comments as being retarded. Of course all this is happening at a subconscious level.

TBeholder says:

Depends on what in CS. And even then —

the US Government is not a charity, and creative programming is not “computer science.” And the result of treating these things as if they were things that they aren’t is abominable. It’s the morass of busywork, waste and fraud that is CS research today. By far the simplest treatment for this mess is to just abolish it.
Because anyone who’s not involved in CS research treats the products of this endeavor as if they were smallpox-infected blankets. Even when it is clearly—in my opinion—good, it winds up ignored. Because of the inescapable grant-related propaganda, it’s impossible to tell what’s good and what’s not.
— “What’s wrong with CS research” by Mencius Moldbug

Alrenous says:

Why do you think I stopped at a bachelor’s.

…well actually it was because I went to university looking for men like this http://www.isegoria.net/2018/06/he-is-a-very-knowledgeable-man/ and found a grand total of zero. But fundamentally those two are the same thing.

EH says:

Physics, math and CS are just as pozzed as the humanities.

In physics, the papers are written to impress rather than inform, the fundamentals are rotten. For instance General relativity makes pi a variable so the speed of light can be a constant, as their religion requires. Physics papers never identify the quantity types or meanings of the variables, as is standard in engineering, and routinely posit absurdities such as G = c = h-bar = 1 (you can make them all 1-something, but not the /same/ something, if you can’t add them then they aren’t the same thing). They come up with crude hacks to make everything a vector, including things that fundamentally aren’t, such as angular momentum. Their grand theories like the so-called standard model aren’t even well specified enough to be properly called hypotheses. It’s all curve-fitting covered with bafflegab to keep outsiders out of the racket.

Math is trivialities and uncheckable falsehoods dressed up in a dozen flavors of jargon and ugly notation.

CS is also garbage, it’s only gone backwards conceptually since 1970, only better hardware (due to process shrinks that were foreseen in detail by the mid-60s) has allowed it to maintain the appearance of progress. Languages and operating systems that are easy and effective are not in the interests of the priesthood that needs to have hidden knowledge unfathomable to the laity in order to keep their parasitic economic niches, so we still have garbage like *NIX, SQL, and pre-compilation. Everything we do with computers today, there was a better and more comprehensible way that was pushed out because it was too effective, too easy, too cheap, too well-documented.

They disguise idiocy with incomprehensibility and sell it as genius. There are a few pockets that resist the tide, to a degree – Geometric (Clifford) Algebra in physics, Frink in CS

peppermint says:

pi a variable is an odd way of saying non-Euclidean geometry. c is the constant that relates conventional units of one dimension of spacetime to another. Angular momentum has three real components and supports componentwise addition and scalar multiplication, therefore it’s a vector, people who sperg out about the tensor algebra are often throwing squid ink because they don’t like to shut up and calculate.

Math being trivialities is the whole point. Finding trivialities and notations that are useful is useful and difficult work.

*NIX and SQL are great. If you want to see tech that sucks, look at Windows, which is only just now evolving a package manager, and Java and Python, which for decades had horrible package management, look at systemd and Gnome 3, RedHat’s solution to Ubuntu and desktop Linux being a threat to RedHat’s platform long term. Package management and soname dependencies weren’t good enough so now there are flat app packages and docker images, and experiments in separating OS+library code from application code like Elastic Beanstalk.

Unix. Open, close, read, write, fork, exec. Cat, |, grep, less. #!, sudo, which.
chmod, chown. /usr, /etc, /home. apt/yum/pip. make, cc. mount, df, du. nc. There are surely problems, the file time markers aren’t what I think they should be and most volumes are mounted noatime for this reason. Opening a network socket is different from opening a file for some reason, nc is a partial solution for the command line. Package management and application isolation is for some reason not solved. Per-file userids are kinda weird when files and volumes are regularly moved between systems. Lots of diagnostic information is accessed in system-dependant ways. Make only tracks files and considers x.o, the result of cc x.c -o x.o, to be x.o regardless of cc -g or cc -O3, which may or may not be intended by the c specification.

What do you want in an OS that Unix doesn’t provide? I dare you to say git for the fs or cd x.zip; ./program or a preference database better than /etc or for async programs to use your one true ipc mechanism. The upgrades from /dev/dsp to PulseAudio and iwconfig to NetworkManager were also RedHat solutions to the problem of transparency.

There’s nothing to say for your hatred for SQL. It is the query language for relational databases. If you hate a basic data structure, that’s your problem. If you would prefer to use different data structures in applications, do it. If you would prefer to query relational databases with a different syntax, write your transpiler and hawk it to the world.

You appear to be a homosexual. I recommend that you consider suicide.

TBeholder says:

Python was made to be an actually useful language. Which it is.
It should not have anything to do with package management at all, except it got both widespread and ported onto platforms that really suck at it. However inevitable that was.

Other than that, yeah. If it works, let it work.

EH says:

On GR: instead of the fictional “warped space” you can do nearly everything (aside from frame-dragging rotational effects that aren’t experimentally well confirmed yet) with intuitive variable refractive index (variable c), and all of GR and more with Geometric Algebra (GA) based Gauge-Theory Gravity (see Doran et. al.)

That’s not the place to start with GA, but see: how the traditional jargon-filled math approach to Clifford Algebras makes things unnecessarily incomprehensible compared to a practical introduction. The areas of math infected with the “Bourbaki virus” are as bad as the scribblings of Derrida’s acolytes.

The point is not to replace axial vectors, which are not the same as proper vectors, with tensors, but rather with oriented areas called bivectors formed from the outer (^) product of regular vectors. For orthogonal vectors a^b = -b^a. The GA of 3-space has multivectors which are the sum of a scalar (real number) component, three vector components (x,y,z), three bivector components (x^y, y^z, z^x; the basis for Lie algebra), and a pseudoscalar (x^y^z). Multiplying any of the vector components (e.g. an axial vector x used to represent angular momentum) by the pseudoscalar gives the orthogonal bivector (y^z) that should really be used. This gets rid of cross products. Anything, X, including a multivector of any dimension, can easily be rotated that in the plane of the bivector, B. This is usually done with a “sandwich operation” looking like: [e^(B/2)]X[e^(-B/2)] so that arbitrarily complex chains of rotation can be done by deeper embeffings.

EH says:

Accidentally hit the submit button. Won’t bother with the typos.

See the _Unix Haters Handbook_ for what is wrong with Unix and a glimpse of what could have been. http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf No, Windows isn’t remotely ok either, but you don’t get stuck in dependency hell, the documentation sucks almost as bad as *nix, but at least you don’t need it as often and you can actually almost always get some real work done without hours of screwing around, instead of almost never with *nix. Nothing works, everything you want to do has thousand amateurish, poorly documented, dangerous little apps to do anything you might want to do, the directory structure is insanity^100 and Python and Java are just slightly less cruft-encrusted instances of all the fundamental failings of the C++/*nix retarded philosophy.

If you think SQL is acceptable after looking at the full syntax for CREATE TABLE, you’re hopeless. (8 screens just to list the sytnax alone) It’s only use is making sure every company has to pay men to do nothing but wrestle with making brain-dead databases do what they really don’t want to do. Paradox was more usable over 20 years ago, though it already had objectitis in the form and interface creation parts.

You’re a slave to mind-rotting technologies built by mediocrities and low-functioning autistics, designed by nobody, and adopted by clueless buzzword-compliant bugmen managers.

peppermint says:

Yes, everyone is impressed with your graded finite dimensional algebra, enough to transfer their butthurt over school to the safe outlet of if only we were told about it. Now, when you say c changes, what does that mean for the reaction of a charge to a magnetic field?

jim says:

Maxwell’s equations imply that the speed of light is invariant, the same for all observers. This was obvious from the beginning, from the time of Maxwell, but hard to get one’s brain around it. How can the speed of light be independent of observer velocity? Makes no sense. And in order to make sense of it, no alternative but to turn our concepts of space and time upside down.

jim says:

I have personally verified that Maxwell’s equations are true, personally done the relevant experiments.

And from the truth of these equations, it follows that my intuitive understanding of space and time is only true for velocities small compared to that of light.

Cloudswrest says:

I have an epistemological problem with special relativity. It is certainly “true” empirically and consistent mathematically. My concern is the science seems to have *stopped* at relativity. It’s taken as a logical primitive, without any further investigation or modelling. For example, let’s take the Aether theory. If you assume that fundamental particles are some sort of self resonant standing waves of the Aether, then movement will alter their resonant frequency and resonant wavelengths in ways consistent with the Lorentz transformations. This is easy to show classically. Of course this is very crude and inchoate, just sayin… My view is not that the speed of light is constant, it just “seems” constant. By this I mean that our local reality is NORMALIZED in terms of the speed of light, whatever it may be. This is obviously illustrated globally in gravity wells. Down low in a gravity well the speed of light is slower. But so are the denizens, so everything looks the same to them.

I wonder if there are any other normalizing constants? For example if you create a “bell jar” the interior of which you can modify fundamental constants with knobs on the outside, e.g Plank’s Constant, the “people” inside won’t notice any point/local changes in their physical laws because of local renormalization. Change Plank’s constant? Well then the Bohr radius changes, atom sizes change, and molecular bond lengths change, rulers made from molecular lattices change, spectral frequencies change, and everything renormalizes back to normal.

I have never seen any articles investigating or speculating on these ideas.

peppermint says:

so you call |0> Aether instead of vacuum, it’s still lorentz invariant

Yara says:

We respect your impressive achievements vis-à-vis TempleOS, just not enough to use it.

TBeholder says:

The rot is never uniform. But generally you won’t know what’s still mostly healthy for the same reasons they don’t know.
Also, there’s a real chance of partial recovery, with at least NGOs and UN losing power. The second Great Confusion.

[…] Source: Jim […]

Joe says:

Well someone should talk to Trijicon and get some of their tritium, they seem to have plenty. Can we have a little more than obtuse and unverified statements?

billrla says:

Joe: Also, tritium used as illumination sources in watches and other hand-held (and usually outdoor-nightime) devices. There seems to be a sufficient supply of tritium for the consumer market. What’s the deal? Is the problem the degree of purification?

Anonymous says:

They might be buying it from foreign sources while promising not to allow it to be diverted it into weapons.

Jim is unfortunately overstating the problem, as usual it’s more a matter of politics and will than a “real” problem, just like the Obamacare site was.

We’ve got a complex about using civilian reactors for weapons, one we helped infect the world with, I’m sure prompted by the Soviets, so our one reactor breeding tritium today is owned by the government’s TVA. It is producing tritium, just not enough for our weapons, so we need to bring another one up to do this, or do something else. And since the TVA is a public works project….

One other problem in all this is that we’re not longer enriching uranium, and getting that from foreign sources for weapons production or maintenance is problematic. We can downblend the highly enriched uranium (HEU) we’ve reserved for our Navy for this purpose, but that just hastens the date we’ll have to start enriching it again for any of these weapons purposes. We also might have some deployed or reserved nuclear weapons with HEU that we can divert to these purposes, but that’s yet another rob Peter to pay Paul play.

peppermint says:

Do you know how to make tritium? I’m sure you could put something together given time.

Does the government know how to hire you to make tritium? No.

Is the government capable of acquiring tritium for weapons use?

Anonymous says:

Is the government capable of acquiring tritium for weapons use?

The government is claiming they can’t make enough for the size of the nuke stockpile they want, not that they can’t make any. But of course we can’t be sure they’re even making useful amounts in that one TVA reactor that’s doing this.

jim says:

> Jim is unfortunately overstating the problem, as usual it’s more a matter of politics and will than a “real” problem, just like the Obamacare site was.

There was plenty of will and stupendous amounts of money to bring up the Obamacare website, yet it did not come up until they sent the diversities away.

There was plenty of will and stupendous amounts of money to build a replacement for the two towers as tall and big, or taller and bigger, than the original, and yet it came in smaller than the original and under intended size.

There was plenty of will to produce plutonium for nuclear batteries, plenty of will to maintain tritium supplies.

Anonymous says:

There was plenty of will and stupendous amounts of money to bring up the Obamacare website, yet it did not come up until they sent the diversities away.

That’s where politics comes in, of course. Although with or without the diversities, it still would have failed because the project management was both politicized and incompetent. For example, specifications way too late and treated as secrets to be protected, breaking changes ordered a week or so before going live, and CMS ordering the programmers to use a non-RDBMS database with a paradigm they weren’t familiar with, which doesn’t work when the people managing it also compress the schedule. They also had the database running on anemic cloud virtual machines; one of the first very tangible signs they were fixing it was when they published a very specific memo about the serious physical hardware they were moving the database to.

There was plenty of will and stupendous amounts of money to build a replacement for the two towers as tall and big, or taller and bigger, than the original, and yet it came in smaller than the original and under intended size.

There was also plenty of will and politics to not do that, and instead celebrate Islam and the terrorists, see for example the crescent pointing towards Mecca that just happened to be part of the original design for the Flight 93 memorial, and the 13 story Park51 mosque that NYC approved to be built in the shadow of the towers.

There was plenty of will to produce plutonium for nuclear batteries, plenty of will to maintain tritium supplies.

That I disagree with, or, rather, I see even more will to render our nukes impotent, to label any plutonium beyond the pale, see for example all the lies about how bred for a long time civilian grade plutonium can be used to make bombs, the outrageous lies about its toxicity, which we now know are false after plenty of industrial exposure before we closed down almost all our nuclear weapons infrastructure, etc.

Yara says:

>There was also plenty of will and politics to not do that, and instead celebrate Islam and the terrorists, see for example the crescent pointing towards Mecca that just happened to be part of the original design for the Flight 93 memorial, and the 13 story Park51 mosque that NYC approved to be built in the shadow of the towers.

Indeed.

peppermint says:

You say there was political will not to build an office tower in one of the world’s biggest cities.

Usually office towers are built by men His Majesty the God-Emperor, Donald Trump, for the purpose of making money, and making the builders famous.

There are lots of buildings that have some guy’s name on them. Then midwit faggots decided that it’s not cool that someone else has their name on a building. So they fed those buildings to niggers, thereby making it impossible to have the kind of 50 year payoff a colossus needs. So the dirt chinks of southeast Asia have better buildings than us. But midwits don’t see ‘us’ as a thing, only themselves, the eternal boomer, alone, aloof, very proud of nothing.

NYC can’t have a replacement for the Twin Towers until it stops being a trashy place where people spit gum onto the street and don’t get their asses kicked by the police.

The Cominator says:

> “There was plenty of will and stupendous amounts of money to bring up the Obamacare website, yet it did not come up until they sent the diversities away.”

Will includes the will to send the diversity away and putting in competent male whites asians and/or jews (I mean if the task is technologically complicated at all).

So there wasn’t “will” to get the Obamacare website done until the diversity failed and it was turning into another political disaster for Obama.

Alrenous says:

Technically speaking there was more will to have a diverse team build a tower. When they dropped that will, the Obamacare website went up. But they normally have too much will to make it diverse, so nothing goes up.

The Cominator says:

“Technically speaking there was more will to have a diverse team build a tower. ”

That is in fact no will at all because a diverse team cannot do anything that complex.

Any leftist who admits this of course even to himself takes a step into heresy though (I wonder who made the decision on the Obamacare website).

Thats why the Soviet Union could never really go back to insane pre Stalin communism after WWII… when they had to fight a total war for their survival they had to make too many compromises with reality to ever go back.

jim says:

Obviously a diverse team can build stuff, if white cisgender heterosexual males in charge of the diversities – or even if not in charge but protected from interference by diversities. But this form of organization reveals what it is intended to conceal – that the diversities have negative value, unless white males assign them tasks suitable for their abilities and interests.

TBeholder says:

What “compromises with reality”? Stalin’s court was using “educated Marxist” as a derisive term for parrots who should never be allowed to run anything non-trivial. According to Bazhanov.
It took commissars long time to control what really happens (rather than watch that there’s always Lenin’s portrait in a visible place and commanders keep don’t get too decadent). Which is why things didn’t fall apart for a long while.
Then selection for mediocrity, black market run by those allowed outside, “advancements” in education, bullshit statistics, and other monkey business became commonplace, and it all rolls.

The Cominator says:

What “compromises with reality”?

Well for one thing you mention commisars. The “dual command” system was quickly abolished after the German invasion began.

Propaganda quickly begun to emphasize nationalism and Russia’s historical resistance to invaders not Marxist gobbledlygook that everyone hated.

Stalin (though he was ALWAYS more tolerant of religion then nearly any other leading communist figure) commanded that 1000s of Orthodox Churches be reopened and even after the war never let the government go after the Orthodox Church again until he died.

Peasants on the collective farms were allowed individual plots (albeit small).

Marxism during the war (and to some degree Stalin made this change after the Great Purge when he really became dictator) under Stalin ceased being the state religion (or at least emphasized as such) and became a mere system of command economy.

Now Stalin otoh did impose Marxism as the state religion in the Soviet satellite countries (especially Poland).

TBeholder says:

> Well for one thing you mention commisars. The “dual command” system was quickly abolished after the German invasion began.
> Propaganda quickly begun to
Not even quickly enough, but…
By that time Red Army was changing for years, as the experience of Soviet participation in Spanish Civil War was digested (it led to promotions) and many deficiencies were fixed during Far East and Finland campaigns. There were all sorts of issues – technical, logistical, organizational… and things that were troublesome got improved or overhauled.
It seems that commissars in army somehow managed to not become a major problem in those campaigns.
Thus, this falls under adaptation to changed situation and priorities, just like the end of “we don’t need mines, we need more mine detectors” attitude, etc.

> Peasants on the collective farms were allowed individual plots (albeit small).
Well, yeah. Was a matter of time once Stalin condemned “excesses” of “certain managers” and the most unhinged ones got removed (for Trotskyism or other heresy). If anything, presence of Lysenko indicates mostly giving up on the state of agriculture in general, IMHO.

> Marxism during the war (and to some degree Stalin made this change after the Great Purge when he really became dictator) under Stalin ceased being the state religion (or at least emphasized as such) and became a mere system of command economy.

While the circle of his hand-picked helpers and advisors despised Marxism almost openly, it won’t be anything more than a state religion requiring a quick ritual bow in its direction on the way to something meaningful.
And the way things rolled, it couldn’t be less.

The Cominator says:

Iran didn’t remain as insanely medieval Shia Islamic after being forced to fight a total war either (against out old buddy Saddam Hussein).

Now UNFORTUNATELY in losing faith they also adopted a kind of feminist pozzed Islam (and decided they now still hated Israel but for leftist reasons instead of the original religiously fanatical reasons).

peppermint says:

Iran has very straightforward reasons to hate Israel: Israel doesn’t want there to be any power centers they don’t control. This is due to the nature of Israelis. The other dirt countries know their place, while the Western and East Asian powers accept the existence of power they don’t control.

Theoretically Israel’s aggression should lead to its conquest. Due to the nature of Israelis, they have amassed power outside of the region that for now prevents this.

The Cominator says:

“Iran has very straightforward reasons to hate Israel: ”

Maybe so but they mainly hate it for leftists reasons now instead of Islamic reasons. Its that its an “apartheid” “neo colonialist” state (the Ayatollah would have talked about jihad against the Infidels particular when they captured Islamic holy land).

Lets look at Iran’s last well known frontman, Ahmadinejad. He never sounded like the Ayatollah Khomeni he sounded more like a radical progressive bordering on a Maoist when he frequently condemned the US and Israel.

peppermint says:

Apartheid and neocolonialist means aggressively expansionist. Argue about whether that’s bad in principle or merely bad when it’s at the expense of Greeks or merely bad because it’s alarming towards other regional powers or whether Iran really just means they don’t like having Israeli assassins murdering Iran’s dudes in Iran and Israeli-linked countries isolating Iran. Can Iran say out loud that if Israel can have secret nukes Iran should also, if Israel and Israeli-controlled countries can send weapons and soldiers into wars in the region Iran borders Iran can too?

jim says:

The consumer market uses an insignificant amount of tritium, and is running on existing stores. To get a good nuclear yield, you need a macroscopic amount of tritium, billions of times more than in a luminous gunsight.

Glenfilthie says:

Tritium does not juice the nuclear fission, it initiates it. If I recall the favoured isotopes for that are of polonium and beryllium. And no, lithium is not unobtanium; every Lipo battery (and they are coming into the country by the boat load) contains recoverable amounts of lithium.

As for fusion weapons, no. We have fission weapons.

As for aeronautics: speed is now irrelevant. No matter how fast you push your airplane, I can make a missile that goes faster. Today’s birds need stealth and vectored thrust capabilities far more than speed. There’s been all kinds of game changing advancements VTOL birds as well. Even so you reach a point of diminishing returns: as we learned in the gulf wars, you can bomb those fig farming goat felchers FORWARD into the Stone Age with sophisticated bombs and planes, but to manage them you still need boots and rifles on the ground.

As for the Pluto missions…good grief, Jim. Just communicating with a probe at that distance is a spectacular human achievement when you consider that it takes almost five and a half hours for a radio signal to reach it. We are pushing our technologies and science to their limits just to communicate at that distance and send data… and you’re bitching because those probes aren’t fission powered?

This is a rather uninformed piece. You’re slipping, Jim 🙂

Karl says:

Sure there is plenty of litium; Jim’s point was about Li6. Natural Lithium is mostly Li7. Isotope separation is the problem.

Fusion weapons, yes for now.

Speed of military airplanes irrelvant? Really?

EH says:

“The yield of Bravo [15Mt] dramatically exceeded predictions, being about 2.5 times higher than the best guess and almost double the estimated maximum possible yield (6 Mt predicted, estimated yield range 4-8 Mt). …. The fuel consisted of 37-40% enriched lithium-6 deuteride encased in a natural uranium tamper. 10 Mt of the yield was from fast fission of the tamper. …. The reason for the unexpectedly high yield was due to the “tritium bonus” provided by the lithium-7 isotope which made up most of the lithium. This isotope was expected to be essentially inert, but in fact it had a substantial reaction cross section with the high energy neutrons produced by tritium-deuterium fusion. [note: nearly all tritium came from Li-7] When one of these high energy neutrons collided with a lithium-7 atom, it could fragment it into a tritium and a helium atom. Tritium was the most valuable fusion fuel, being both highly reactive and causing extremely energetic fusion, so this extra source of tritium greatly increased the weapon yield. ”
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Castle.html

jim says:

You are an ignorant idiot.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Glenfilthie says:

I am aware of my ignorance Jim, which puts me well ahead of you. The other day I watched the kids at one of the tech companies testing a bipedal robot that could do back flips. No doubt you and your fan bois and alpha soys will contemptuously dismiss that the same way intellectual poseurs dismissed Edison and Tesla and their “stunts with electricity” back in the last century. But for somebody that actually knows something about the science and technologies involved… only an idiot would say we are devolving.
You probably wrote this one on iPad in your trailer park, not realizing that a mere 30 years ago, doing that was the stuff of science fiction. You would have been listening to your music on a cassette playing Walkman. Three short decades later your kids would have their all their music on a device the size of a thumbnail. Technology is leaping forward in leaps and bounds; I posit that your ability to appreciate it has been dulled by 60 years of unprecedented advancement.

jim says:

When Tesla’s cars can drive themselves while their human sleeps in the back seat, then I will be impressed.

When a robot can pick cherries, then I will be impressed.

When a robot can pick up a clothes piled in a heap, sort them, and fold them, then I will be impressed.

Moore’s law in electronics has been driven by photolithogaphy, by lithographic details becoming ever smaller.

The last reduction in photolithographic wavelength, possibly the last ever reduction in photolithographic wavelength, was in 1990.

The last reduction in lithographic scale, possibly the last ever reduction in lithographic scale, occurred in 2007.

Transistor counts are still going up – but chip area is going up similarly. A more interesting metric is the cost per transistor per hertz, which is no longer going down.

Since transistors and their connects are not getting smaller, increased transistor counts are accommodated by bigger chips, and by vertical integration on chip, which does not reduce price, decrease power consumption, or increase speed. When they announce that they used to have transistors spaced x nanometers, and now they are spaced half x nanometers, they are actually much the same size, but piled on top of each other.

Yes, it was way cool that NASA recently sent a robot to Pluto. Less cool that the robot’s battery was half flat because we can no longer produce plutonium 238.

Glenfilthie says:

You’ll also probably be unemployed by that point too.

But you prove my point; if you cannot appreciate the small steps, you can’t appreciate the big ones until they show up in your trailer park. 😉

jim says:

When you accuse me of living in a trailer park, you are implying that affluent women are well behaved. Statistics show otherwise – women in high income careers have higher divorce rate and lower marriage rate. Statistics on grossly underage sex are unreliable for obvious reasons, but my personal observation is that female children of high income career women start fucking astonishingly early, frequently well before puberty.

When Charles Murray claimed the upper class was well behaved, he conflated the behavior of high income women with that of women married to high income husbands, evasively avoiding breaking down his statistics by sex. High income husbands and their wives are well behaved. High income women are badly behaved, and their female children astonishingly badly behaved.

A successful female lawyer is worse than a truck stop stripper.

Glenfilthie says:

No, I am saying, bluntly and straightforwardly, that properly raised women tend to be more behaved, and that your assumption that all women are like that is flat out wrong. IMHO it’s an opinion derived from being uninformed and uncultured.
I apologize Jim, it was an insult unworthy of both of us, and I retract it . If you want to believe that we are headed back to the Stone Age it is no skin off my nose.

Theshadowedknight says:

And you would know all about properly behaved women and the raising thereof, right? You must be a subject matter expert. If only everyone else raised their daughters to become militant lesbian feminists then we would all see how well behaved properly raised women truly are.

Shut up, boomer.

peppermint says:

Bluntly, women raised by middle class Boomers are catladies and coalburners, while women raised by working class Boomers are much more realistic about what they need.

jim says:

The daughters of Harvard mums are not behaved. You are most likely to find well raised women in poor rural areas.

And even well raised women will behave like that given half a chance. I cruise for chicks in the back of beyond and in major tourist centers. Put any chick in a major tourist center away from friends and family, her knickers drop. All Women Are Like That – even though some can restrain themselves when friends and family are watching.

If there were any women who behaved as the blue pill depicts them as behaving, if there were any women who wanted what the blue pill tells us women want, Brad Pitt would have had a successful marriage, Einstein would not have wound up married to the KGB, and Feynman would not had to do what I am doing: Learn game, and pretend to be an asshole.

Glenfilthie says:

You keep shying away from the truth Jim: in real life men are defined by their actions. If you act like an asshole, you ARE an asshole. And eventually assholes get called out. Usually by real men, that know how to treat alpha poseurs. A lot of these kids are going to get hurt listening to you, and a few will deserve it too.

I won’t argue your notions about sexuality because Brad Pitt is aHollywood flake. Einstein was a Jewish academic. Dunno who Feynman is and don’t care. If all you aspire to be is another cock on some skank’s carousel, that is all you will be. For you it’s enough I suppose.

jim says:

Women get to define who are the real men. They should not be allowed to do so, but to impose the necessary restraints against female misconduct would require us to be willing and able to do violence to a women when she continued in unacceptable behavior.

And the female standard of what constitutes a “real man” is what you would expect of a small evil child raised by cannibal head hunters.

For some other measure of “real man” to work, we need to be able to stop women from behaving as every woman these days behaves.

Theshadowedknight says:

You would think that we assholes get called out, and to be fair, we do. Then we acknowledge that we are assholes, and hint that maybe you are going to get smacked around if you make a point of it. That solves the problem of being called out, because then we just look that much more the asshole. Real men can be violent, and they are pretty rare on the ground these days. Since I am capable of doing violent things and hurting people, even if I am faking willingness, few will challenge, fewer will force the issue. That means I win.

jim says:

Looking as if you might hurt people and break things if need be, while remaining calm and in control, is a huge hit with chicks.

Glenfilthie says:

“Women get to define who are the real men….”

Hence the trailer park comment. You’re going to let a woman (and a tire biting skank, at that) define your character Jim?

jim says:

Government thugs allow women to define my character.

Fixing the problem is coup complete. Genuine masculinity requires overthrown of the existing state. Hence the closer men are to the existing state, the closer they are to Harvard and Washington, the more severely they are emasculated, and the worse the women behave. Which is why I cruise the far side of the back of beyond for chicks, why you are better off sending your daughter to a truck stop stripping joint than to Harvard.

Venture capitalists allow women to destroy their businesses. They have much more power than me, and yet are still powerless and emasculated. What can I do except hide from power and subvert the state from the shadows?

A female primary society, where women are deemed eternally free from sin, and all female bad behavior and bad outcomes are supposedly the fault of evil men, is necessarily a society where a women define what a real man is – by their behavior, not by their words. And their behavior defines manliness as being a really bad man.

For a more prosocial definition of manliness to work, have to punish bad female behavior, after the style of the Taliban and 1790s Australia, severely restrict female sexual choice and dramatically reduce the significance and role of female consent.

peppermint says:

Glen, you think being a man is about more than fuck bitches make money.

Well, in your generation, the fuck bitches make money men reproduced, with many of your generation’s best women, while the we must secure the existence of our people and a future for our children men were suppressed and coerced, incuding intellectually, into cuckoldry.

Consequently, in my generation, we understand the fucking bitches and making money are the very basics you need to be a man.

Higher aspirations are very important. But only as they imply the children being able to fuck bitches make money.

Look at gangster movies. The good ones are about gangsters fucking bitches making money with higher aspirations towards the future of the children. The gay ones are about faggots running around for their personal, immediate pleasure. Then there’s Miller’s Crossing, about a man who gets stuck in a pointless gang war trying to deal with a rat kike, wins, and leaves town because mere fuck bitches make money isn’t enough for his level of talent.

Anonymous says:

The last reduction in lithographic scale, possibly the last ever reduction in lithographic scale, occurred in 2007.

Transistor counts are still going up – but chip area is going up similarly.

Unlike nuclear stuff, this is not an area I’ve really studied with much of a level of understanding of the science and technology, but that’s not my impression, given (expensive) tricks like multi-patterning (but ELV looks more dubious the more I look at it).

So I checked the Wikipedia transistor count page, and sorting by date introduced I see that in Intel’s node shrink from 2011 22 nm to 2014 14 nm, the 18-core Xeon Haswell-E5 with 5,560,000,000 transistors took up 661 mm², and the two years later 22-core Xeon Broadwell-E5 with 7,200,000,000 transistors took up 456 mm². So I think your feature size claim is overall wrong for that period, but it might be true today.

A more interesting metric is the cost per transistor per hertz, which is no longer going down.

Dennard scaling wasn’t part of Moore’s Law, was just a nice side effect for a long time.

The most interesting question I have is “What the hell happened to Intel’s seemingly eternal fab strength?”, the more we see their move to their 10 nm node failing hard. Note I’m not focusing on the mostly marketing now nanometers number, just that they set a target for a design shrink they’re failing to meet, whereas as far as I know Samsung and TSMC are not failing in what they target, and perhaps Global Foundries as well.

I suspect a lot of the answer follows your general themes, plus the likely interrelated fallout of their adopting stack ranking for too long, sometimes firing more 15% of their staff in a year, it’s always a political who actually gets fired. And perhaps their reported shift to moving faster by for example doing less verification work, and it’s also reported the company is now more marketing than technology driven, which aligns with all their diversity mongering. 3D XPoint/Optane also is looking to be a marketing driven failure once it appears in the field.

Anonymous 2 says:

I recall reading some years ago that the physical limit to scaling was a feature size of 8 nm or so. This limit is now said to be a bit smaller (perhaps due to moving to thin and tall transistors). That indicates in any event that we won’t see many more generations of shrinking.

The big issue is, of course, loss of Dennard scaling around 2004. If we still had it, we would have had, roughly, 14 more years of clock frequency doubling. Let’s call that 9 doublings, which would mean running the same chips as today at a 2048 GHz clock frequency. This would of course have its own unique problems (like speed of light across the chip) and perhaps be impossible for other reasons … but still.

Alrenous says:

I play video games.
This means I notice immediately when computer tech starts to stagnate. Computer hardware lasts much longer on the market than it used to, across all sectors.

jim says:

Had progress continued, would have taken photolithography down from 193 nanometers to 160 nanometers.

Below 160 nanometers, photolithography stops working, because the photon energy is too high relative to the bonding energy of even the most strongly bonded forms of matter. At that point should have switched to contact lithography, with masks being drawn by ion beams.

If no work on contact lithography, given up on continuing Moore’s law. But we gave up before we finished the low hanging fruit, before we needed to switch to contact lithography, the low hanging fruit being photolithography with 160 nanometer light and perfluorocarbon immersion.

Alrenous says:

Further, there’s probably at least one yet more interesting method that nobody has even thought of. Stagnant technology bores the muses, and they go tell politicans how to lie more flagrantly instead.

Steve Johnson says:

>As for fusion weapons, no. We have fission weapons.

You have zero inhibitions to spouting off about things which you are totally ignorant of, don’t you?

This is a sub-wikipedia level error:

“A thermonuclear weapon is a second-generation nuclear weapon design using a secondary nuclear fusion stage consisting of implosion tamper, fusion fuel, and spark plug which is bombarded by the energy released by the detonation of a primary fission bomb within, compressing the fuel material (tritium, deuterium or lithium deuteride) and causing a fusion reaction. Some advanced designs use fast neutrons produced by this second stage to ignite a third fast fission or fusion stage. The fission bomb and fusion fuel are placed near each other in a special radiation-reflecting container called a radiation case that is designed to contain x-rays for as long as possible. The result is greatly increased explosive power when compared to single-stage fission weapons. The device is colloquially referred to as a hydrogen bomb or, an H-bomb, because it employs the fusion of isotopes of hydrogen.”

A boomer should have noticed that “A-Bomb” and “H-Bomb” were different things but maybe you didn’t see it on television.

Steve Johnson says:
Glenfilthie says:

We currently have not been able to create nuclear fusion, cold or hot, here on earth to date.

And watching your fan boys dismiss the tactical revolution of stealth and VTOL technologies has been amusing.

But listening to you boys maybe I need to concede this point to our esteemed blog host: you fellas have SFA for STEM aptitude.

jim says:

You are an ignorant idiot.

Every H bomb creates nuclear fusion.

What we have not been able to do is create a self sustaining controlled nuclear fusion reaction.

We routinely create nuclear fusion in a controlled manner, but we don’t get enough fusion to produce useful power. Every controlled neutron source relies on nuclear fusion.

We routinely create self sustaining nuclear fusion in an uncontrolled manner, and that is hydrogen bomb.

Glenfilthie says:

They do that by implosion; it lasts only a merest fraction of a second, and even you will have to concede the technical and scientific hurdles involved in trying to control the pressures and temperatures involved. That ‘sustained’ part of the verbiage was implied, or so I thought, but whatever. If some idiot thinks that cold fusion that can happen in some eccentric inventor’s garage I suppose there is no harm in it.

They’ve also made metallic hydrogen the same way (implosion) but they can’t study it for the same reason, the state only lasts a few billionths of a second.

But I digress. Even the Norks can make bombs now, it’s WW2 technology, and everyone can do it, so no, we are not devolving. And anyone that makes a big deal of not being able to produce ICBMS is an idiot too. Perhaps you missed the debut of the Patriot missiles of the 90’s, Jim? They’ve had two decades to evolve. Your ICBMs are becoming archaic weapons, if you haven’t noticed. They’ll be intercepted and destroyed in orbit.

We live in interesting times – if you have the intellect to appreciate it.

peppermint says:

> as a child I saw tv news guys gleefully announcing Patriots shooting down evil commie/nazi/islamic S.C.U.D.S. over the far-flung backwater province of Iraq
> that means nuclear ICBMs are irrelevant and no one needs to be aware of the fusion neutrons that can fission non-fissile actinides

Steve Johnson says:

This is just pathetic – sequential quotes:

G >As for fusion weapons, no. We have fission weapons.

SJ > A thermonuclear weapon is a second-generation nuclear weapon design using a secondary nuclear fusion stage consisting of implosion tamper

G > We currently have not been able to create nuclear fusion, cold or hot, here on earth to date.

J > Every H bomb creates nuclear fusion.

G > They do that by implosion; it lasts only a merest fraction of a second, and even you will have to concede the technical and scientific hurdles involved in trying to control the pressures and temperatures involved

You are obviously a moron. You will still be a moron but at least you won’t look like a pig-headed moron if you practice using this phrase for the times you need it (which are often) – “I was mistaken”.

Instead, I expect that you will reply with more incorrect insults like Jim living in a trailer park or me living in someone’s basement or something.

TBeholder says:

> Patriot missiles
The ones they couldn’t fix to avoid friendly fire for well over a decade?
Speaking of advances.
> ICBMs are becoming archaic weapons, if you haven’t noticed. They’ll be intercepted and destroyed in orbit.
Wasn’t this a fashionable idea back in 1980-s?

peppermint says:
Yara says:

Peppermint, how should I feel about what I just watched? 80’s aesthetic was the final death of beauty, coincidentally the decade that the Boomer took over the institutions. I don’t want, among other things, shitty boxy plastic crap everywhere; I want smooth, flowing lines in white ceramic, glass, leather, wood, and steel.

peppermint says:

Why 80s:
* maximal American power
* tech was almost modern and kept coming out
* techno music was first invented. In the 90s and 00s it became known as for porn and degenerate parties. In the 00s and 10s chiptunes and youtube as the listening environment made techno great again

Jewtube gave people choice over a huge library as bait to hook people into accepting total Jewgle control and monitoring of what they listen to, but the plan to lock it down to the level of the superheterodyne jew that never plays xurious or moonman and the recod store jews that would never stock them remains incomplete because when the people play one elite control scheme against another they can win temporarily.

Using jewtube, musicians who didn’t want to make songs promoting casual “mating” could find an audience. Synthwave is comfy, inspiring, and not degenerate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WI4-HUn8dFc

Heroin faggot looking faggots who practiced guitar for a few hours are eternally btfo.

Meanwhile, folk music, by transcurious big brain nibbas with a guitar and a bunch of college slogans, thinks it sounds like dreampop: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NICOFFEoj3Y

pdimov says:

What we have been unable to do is create controlled fusion that consumes less energy than it produces.

peppermint says:

> all kinds of game changing advancements VTOL birds

The War Nerd pointed out that Ospreys could have made Carter’s rescue mission succeed, but they’re unreliable. The Marines wanted a STOVL F-35, but they didn’t and it just made the F-35 suck in other ways. VTOL is a nice idea. If only we had the ability to make it.

Yara says:

VTOL is very possible and will come within the decade.

jim says:

Lots of things have been possible since 1972, and yet have not arrived.

Yara says:

VTOL was possible but not practical before about 2015. Now it’s possible and practical, but no one else has yet quite figured out what to do to make it work.

Glenfilthie says:

The tilt rotors are no longer unreliable. When guys like the Marines are using them and clamouring for more, you know you have a winner. But remember watching those early ones tearing themselves and their crews apart too… and a lot of that was simply pilot error. They were literally inventing a new way to fly.

Theshadowedknight says:

I have no idea if the Osprey works or not, but the “Marines” are clamouring for more women in combat, because they do as they are told. Just because the military asks for something does not mean it works. It might just mean that they were told in no uncertain terms that they better fucking ask for it.

peppermint says:

Right. They were, and are, unreliable, and the Marines were incapable of training to use them. Not because VTOL is impossible or not such an advantage it’s been a staple of FPS from Crysis to Halo, but because America is right now incapable of developing new tech or maintaining old tech.

Oliver Cromwell says:

US already operated VTOL planes, that first flew in 1967. VTOL is old technology, but requires extreme trade-offs, usually isn’t worth it.

Osprey is a crappy cargo plane or an awesome helicopter depending on how you look at it, that costs 3x as much as an ordinary helicopter or cargo plane.

Anonymous 2 says:

Yes, I’m afraid I don’t get it. The Harrier had its first flight in 1967 and production ended in 2003. Is there some titanic level of irony going on in this discussion that is beyond me?

javier says:

Harrier is a terrible plane. Very unreliable, even the best pilots crash them often. In exchange for this it has worse combat capabilities across the board.

Here’s what happened: Air force wants fast planes that can win dogfights. Navy wants planes that can land on carriers. Marines want VTOL so they can operate from forward bases without runways. Congress wants one plane that does all of this, and contractors want congress’s money. So they promise the f35 will do All The Things, even though they know it can’t, and hope for the best.

The result is as Jim says, a frankenfighter that costs obscene amounts of money and is inferior to everything. We already had the f22 Raptor which was the best fighter on the planet. It was so good there was no point in fighting them because they could not be matched. Now the Chinese are going to have no problem engaging the f35.

Tritium is found in exit signs and other applications. I find it implausible that the US doesn know how to make it or has a shortage of it.

US military decline is not a problem is the rest of the world also see a similar decline ,which seems to be the case. Absolute military might does not matter; only relative might, in which case the US is peerless.

jim says:

China and Russia can build and operate fast neutron reactors. The US has not been able to do so for a very long time. If you cannot build and operate a fast neutron reactor, cannot produce Lithium 6, and cannot make tritium, then cannot build nukes, and probably cannot keep existing nukes operational.

Steve says:

No mention of Dr. Steven Greer or Unackowledged

jim says:

Who?

Yara says:

Steven Greer, Mr. UFO Man. I find his sociological description of the military-industrial deep state plausible, though his claims of antigravity and alien tech + pseudo-spiritual fairy circle voodoo are obviously utterly unsupported by replicable observation.

I’ve no knowledge of “Unackowledged”.

siberiancat says:

There’s really not much fundamental difficulty in using mass spectrometers or centrifuges for isotope separation.

jim says:

It is not that hard, but somehow, the centrifuges are not running any more. You might say it was a political decision to turn them off. Was it a political decision to render them incapable of being turned on? Is the lack of fast breeder reactors a political decision? Was the fact that we don’t have nuclear batteries for our spacecraft a political decision?

Alrenous says:

Could be. Saudis hate nuclear everything. They prefer oil-fired power plants.
That said I personally doubt it. Saudis are not very sophisticated and as long as the plants themselves aren’t being built, probably aren’t inclined to look into it deeply.

peppermint says:

Technical solutions are useless in the face of the kinds of social problems our top professors are cooking up in their labs. We, as in you and me, could figure out how to sort atoms with lasers, I’d be willing to fly to Persia and build it for achmadinnerjacket if he could promise me protection from jews.

jim says:

The top secret trick to making laser separation of uranium isotopes work is, so I hear, two-photon hyperfine transition of uranium hexafluoride, rather than the well known and not at all secret single photon hyperfine transition. But that is just a rumor.

Zach says:

Kerbal Space Program boy Scott M. has a nice series of the historical knowledge of attaining nuclear material. Here I start with the last one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNT28WKAxgs

Stephen W says:

I dont think it is a coincidence that Intel losing their process lead recently coincides with a diversity drive over the last couple of years.

Oliver Cromwell says:

The US has progressively outlawed nuclear technology, begun various crash programmes when the deficiencies have looked too bad, then cancelled them when it became clear that they could not succeed without reversing most or all of the anti-nuclear laws.

The US has a policy of unilateral self-disarmament that will occur accidentally-on-purpose when politicians realise that long lead time items required for new or refurbished warheads whose production they outlawed can’t be rapidly substituted.

This policy probably does not represent technological decline because the situation is much better in countries like the UK, France, and even non-nuclear weapons states like Japan, which should be equally or worse affected by a general technological decline.

jim says:

It looks to me that the shortage of Plutonium 238, and the curious lack of fast neutron reactors, is world wide, even if some countries are better at it than the US.

I am not seeing a general decline in technology in every single field. Some fields continue to progress, but many fields are failing to progress, many are regressing, and every year fewer fields are progressing.

Oliver Cromwell says:

http://fissilematerials.org/library/ipfm15.pdf

Page 22.

The situation is considerably worse in the US than any country of remotely similar capacity. The UK in particular has an enormous stockpile of Plutonium as the world centre of reprocessing of nuclear fuel, something which the US outlawed.

Civilian technology tends to be a spin-off from arms races. Even the NASA stuff, which had immense amounts of useful spin-offs, was in itself part of the Cold War nuclear arms race.

Orwell was right that only the threat of war keeps governments rooted in reality.

With the Soviet collapse, challenge and thus reality went away for the USG. A lot of tritium is not necessary because nukes are deterrents and whatever nukes Russia has left are not even being properly maintained and China never had that many nukes. If there was a serious threat, smart white males would again be put in charge of the kinds of things that end up making tritium. Since there is no serious threat and a small nuclear arsenal is sufficient, black women can those kinds of jobs as a sinecure.

This is the same with everything really. The aging fighter airplane arsenal. No other country has large numbers of decisively better ones so they are okay. And if they are okay it means the budget can be spent on accomodating trans soldiers, not new airplanes.

I think emergence of a new superpower would make America suddenly sane and put smart white males back into positions, because results would matter yet again. But whom and how? Russia lacks the economic strength. China seems to think it is better to sell stuff and build an economic empire than to put boots on foreign ground. Sure they would like to get Taiwan and maybe pay back to Japan, but they will not go on a world-conquering rampage because it is unnecessary, the world, or at least enough countries are all too happy to willingly cooperate with the Chinese economic empire, the One Belt One Road and all that.

So effectively the whole world thinks let’s not even try to compete with Americas incredibly expensive arsenal, their usage is restrained by the Cathedral anyway, just focus on researching stuff that makes military bullying expensive (Russia) or focus on the economy (China). From where I am sitting America currently looks like a man carrying a MiniGun, which has awesome firepower and is very scary, but it is heavy as shit, he is sweating, his knees are trembling under the weight, and knows that there is hardly any realistic threat justifying using that kind of firepower. And the MiniGun is definitely aging and has maintenance issues.

In this century, the threats are internal, like terrorism or civil war. The MiniGun guy should be mostly worried about poison slipped into his sandwich. Which does not motivate him to research MiniGun V2.0 which, i.e. arms races, were the driver of most technological progress so far.

jim says:

Science died shortly after World War II – at the start of the cold war, not the end.

Tech progress slowed down markedly in 1972 – the end of the cold war in 1989 made no very noticeable difference.

1972 is precisely SALT I and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, although I would not expect such things to have an immediate effect. Well, on tritium yes. But it is hard to measure overall tech level, you need at least broad categories, for example computing & telco, automotive, aviation and so on. I can certainly name cars made after 1972 over here that I respect (BMW M3 E30) and probably the same can be said about American cars.

Also, science wasn’t needed for the Cold War. Nukes already existed, the rocket science already existed, the ICBM arms race was mostly about engineering. The important new thing was onboard electronics, computers, for airplanes, tanks, missiles, which means miniaturization which means integrated circuits. Dummers wrote in 1952 “With the advent of the transistor and the work on semi-conductors generally, it now seems possible to envisage electronic equipment in a solid block with no connecting wires.” I don’t know the semiconductor timeline, but clearly pre-Cold-War. So again it seems the timeline from the first prototype IC’s to the sophisticated guidance electronics of the Tomahawks it is just engineering, not science.

I think science is not a byproduct of arms races, it is technology, engineering that is. That is because when you need to build something rapidly, you tinker, you don’t work on theory. Later on scientists explain why it worked.

pdimov says:

>when you need to build something rapidly, you tinker, you don’t work on theory. Later on scientists explain why it worked.

Top quote.

Anonymous says:

More technological advances since 1972 I though of while taking a shower: the judicious use of plastics has significantly decreased the cost of reliable self-defense handguns, and there’s been a lot of process improvement technologies, although for metals I’m pretty sure it was all developed before 1972. CAD/CAM which is now heavily used for gun design and manufacturing has vastly improved since then, but originated before. There have been lots of advances in optics for guns, laser range finding, there have been lots of advances in lasers in general, LEDs as well. Despite the ever more heavy hand of government, medical imaging has drastically improved, computer technology has made CAT scanners affordable, but the first was developed before or by 1972, ditto PET scanning, MRI was conceived of by 1972 but put into practice later, so this could be taken to confirm the claim about progress stopping.

Space, well, anyone who didn’t feel a thrill when they watched the simultaneous landing of the 2 side boosters in the first Falcon Heavy launch should just retire to a subsistence farm with no mail or parcel service, we are finally seeing real tangible and financial based progress after this area stagnated around 1972 or before. Radio and telecommunications progress has been very substantial, even if the smartphone is not an entirely good thing. Even if but LCD screen roots are earlier than 1972, computer screen technology is vastly advanced, when was the last time any of us used a CRT for that or video? The Compact Disc and DVDs and now Blu-ray vastly improved previous analog technologies except for Laserdisc, which all of those are based on, so that could also support the claim.

jim says:

When Soros watched the simultaneous landing of the 2 side boosters in the first Falcon Heavy launch he felt horror at the outrageous maleness of it.

The eye of Soros fell upon Musk, and now SpaceX’s job, like NASA’s job, will no longer be getting stuff into space, but raising the self esteem of women, black women, and Muslims.

As I said in inclusivity codes of conduct what Musk is trying to do cannot be done by cosying up to people who want to destroy technological civilization (the warmists) and who want western civilization to die. He builds electric cars and solar panel batteries to appease our enemies who just do not want us to settle space.

And, predictably, the eye of Soros has now fallen upon him. All those involuntarily celibate nerds at his rocket center are “problematic”, and he will discover that our enemies are unappeasable.

A reusable rocket could show an honest, unsubsidized, profit, lifting communication satellites, survey satellites, spy satellites, and weapons systems into space, eventually leading to the technology where it could show an honest, unsubsidized profit lifting people to solar system resources. But the kind of people who could build an unsubsidized re-usable earth to orbit rocket are, as Musk is now finding out, “problematic”.

Anonymous says:

Our enemies are unappeasable, but I don’t see this axiomatically ruining SpaceX. He’d got in his favor real customers who need stuff lofted, and by driving down the price, potentially a lot more of them, and plenty who aren’t in the US. He may be watching for SJW infiltration, he’s certainly avoided it to the extent SpaceX has been technically wildly successful, “rocket science” is probably the most unforgiving engineering discipline. The legal and regulatory regime he’s working under is getting better, and it would be significant if the Supreme Court becomes right of center for the first time since FDR. I wonder if Trump will or would support him, Tesla won’t find favor with Trump, but SpaceX hopefully balances that our or better.

Anonymous says:

Electronics tech was really healthy in the early 1970s, and progress as we’re defining it didn’t stop for a long time. Intel 1103 DRAM started shipping in 1970, and their 4004 microprocessor was first shipped the year after. Progress isn’t stopping in persistent storage media like hard disks, flash (building up in multiple layers), optical, or tape, and maybe Intel and Micron have something real in 3D XPoint/Optane. Network progress, well, that really took off in the 1970s along with laser printing, and networking continues to this day, for local networks slowed down in part by most consumers being satisfied with 1000BT speeds. Rechargeable battery technology has also advanced since then, from nasty NiCad to NiMH and various lithium chemistries, and even in new ways to do cheap and heavy lead acid batteries.

Lots of other stuff has improved since 1972, cars, refining technology to for example handle heavy sour crude, oil and gas extraction technology, commercial jet airplanes, jet engine technology so you don’t need the power and extra redundancy of 3-4 engines to cross an ocean safely, lots of progress in chemicals, plastics, composites, ceramics, paint, agriculture and pesticides despite the greens doing everything they can to starve most of the world’s population to death, the list is too long to detail.

jim says:

Yes, batteries have improved, hard disks and networks are still improving, but it is not true that cars and refining technology has improved. I used to service and substantially rebuild my old car. Not impressed by new cars. Passenger planes are unchanged except for uglier stewardesses, longer delays during boarding and disembarkation, and worse treatment during boarding and disembarkation.

Yara says:

Passenger planes don’t have stewardesses anymore, they have flight attendants. Naturally, the role of the flight attendant is to grace the passenger’s eyes with as little lithe fertility as possible, without actually straying into post-menopausal grandmotherly territory, relieving him of any undesirable exposure to the sight of a Real Woman and thereby insuring against the incitement of any unfavorable comparisons to the fat nagging shrew waiting for him at home.

But at least we have winglets.

Anonymous says:

but it is not true that cars and refining technology has improved. I used to service and substantially rebuild my old car. Not impressed by new cars. Passenger planes are unchanged….

Car crashes are much more survivable than they were in 1972, although insurance companies have discovered that developments like ABS result in more people using up that margin by driving more aggressively. Refining technology has definitely improved, I had a friend who worked on what was one of Exxon’s first four Flexicoking units (it was producing too much coke), and these first units were put into production a while after 1972. Passenger planes, you’re just ranting, they are lots more reliable and killing many fewer people, both in absolute numbers and much more by number of trips and miles flown, costing less to operate, and without the heavy hand of the CAB costing much less to fly on. All but the later are technology improvements which are orthogonal to how we’re now treated worse than cattle.

pdimov says:

>developments like ABS result in more people using up that margin by driving more aggressively.

The ability to drive more aggressively counts as progress in my book.

peppermint says:

Computers, plastics, and computer aided design upgraded cars up until the ’90s.

Then cars started becoming almost entirely plastic and having super complicated instructions involving easily broken small plastic components to change a headlight bulb, and despite highway speeds being up, the top gear went down for “responsiveness” or “fun factor” on the test drive, because it’s sold by the test drive, not by how comfortable it is to use and maintain long term.

That’s because customers are niggers/boomers.

Is the car of 2020 better and higher tech than the car of 2000? Yes, by some definitions.

Anonymous says:

Is the car of 2020 better and higher tech than the car of 2000?

Very possibly not, I certainly cringe at the prospect of someday being forced to pay an extra $10,000 just for a “wired” car, but the claim was that they haven’t improved since 1972.

jim says:

Not seeing it. Do you have some numbers and sources for airline safety and airline cost?

As you have noticed, insurance costs do not indicate that cars are more survivable. That regulatory authorities command that cars be made more survivable does not in fact equate to cars actually becoming more survivable, any more than el Presidente Maduro commanding bread for all Venezuelans resulted all Venezuelans getting bread, or the British national health service providing free healthcare for everyone results in people actually getting effective treatment.

Anonymous says:

> > Do you have some numbers and sources for airline safety and airline cost?

> No US carrier fatal incidents between February 2009 and April 2018? Going from Wikipedia’s 1972 page, 7 incidents killing a total of 176 people including 2 on the ground. And 3 hijackings.

That is not what I see when I look up Wikipedia. Looks like the number of airliner incidents roughly constant since the late sixties. There were a bunch of exceptionally bloody incidents in 1975, but that was a random fluctuation, not a long term trend.

I am just eyeballing the length of the lists by year. Maybe there is a trend to less severe incidents. The death rate in 1975 was quite remarkable, but airliner deaths are inherently a bursty phenomenon, and you can use statistics to prove anything you want by doing the right statistics on a bursty phenomenon, as Taleb observed. Maybe one of us or both of us should produce a bar graph of deaths by year from the Wikipedia list.

Anonymous says:

This is the original “Anonymous”, the one at posting at 2018-07-11 at 00:09 is replying to a post by me that got removed.

So, 2018-07-11 at 00:09, if we’re focused on the quality of airplanes, the whole universe of accidents isn’t as interesting as a single fleet’s, the Southwest 737-700 incident that killed one passenger from a catastrophic engine self-disassembly has little relationship to the Cubana de Aviación 737-200 crash a month later. I could point out the design date differences, 1968 vs. late 1990s, but almost certainly it’s more relevant that the Cuban planes were poorly maintained and operated deathtraps.

For example, in the previous year the Guyanese had banned that exact plane from their airspace because of overloading with improperly stowed luggage (a primary reason to make such a trip is to buy stuff than you can’t get, or at a sane price, in Cuba). For the same reason, I didn’t count the 4 Aeroflot crashes in 1972 that killed a total of 507 people to contrast with the 9 years period US carriers went without a fatal incident.

jim says:

Not counting stuff on this ground and that ground is reasonable, but one tends to be unconsciously selective in what one does not count. Therefore, by all means do this in numbers one generates for one’s own use, but should not present those numbers as evidence for other people.

Using such numbers is apt to result in the madness of crowds, as the opinion of the crowd circularly creates the supposed external evidence for the crowd’s opinions, as happened with the evidence for global warming, where everyone subject to peer review replaced the actual evidence for temperatures with the “real” temperatures, whenever the actual evidence pointed to the “wrong” result – as it usually did.

Alrenous says:

Science nationalized in 1945. Immediately proceeds to perish. Communism is bad for you, what a surprise.
My working theory is prewar-trained scientists lingered, with their prewar habits, until the 70s. Or maybe all good science is done by folks in their 20s and it was about first-generation versus second-generation students of postwar science.

Sam J. says:

“…China never had that many nukes…”

When I see people saying this I always wonder, how the hell do you know this? We do know the Chinese have underground tunnel systems with reloadable ICBM launchers.Why would they build reloadable launchers if they only had a few ICBMs???

From wiki,”…The number of nuclear warheads in China’s arsenal is a state secret. There are varying estimates of the size of China’s arsenal. China is estimated by the Federation of American Scientists to have an arsenal of about 260 total warheads as of 2015…”

Isn’t the Federation of American Scientists that group of commie assholes? I wouldn’t believe anything they say. I bet the Chinese have assloads of nuclear weapons. LOTS. If you were on this project think of the iron rice bowl prospects of building nukes. You could press on forever building them.

Frederick Algernon says:

Jim, would you consider opening an email correspondence with me? I would like to discuss a few things that are not really conducive to the round table format of comments chains. If not, no worries. You can probably find my email via the blog’s back end…

Mister Grumpus says:

Your most depressing post yet, though I can’t explain why.

Here’s a question:

Can you all think of any (other) historical examples of decline coming on so rapidly? As in, so much decline within a single generation’s lifetime?

Or rather, is this typical? Like the last time China (or Rome or wherever) lost its mind, did “the towers fall down” this rapidly then too?

Carlylean Restorationist says:

History won’t regard it as quick, probably. With the perspective of some historical distance, the 18th century will be seen as complete chaos and the 19th century will be seen as cuckery run amok.
The English Civil War was probably not even the start.

We look around and see all the drugs and stuff, but a future historian will respond to that idea by asking why anyone tried to prohibit alcohol;
we look around and see mass crime, but a future historian will wonder why the Victorian slums were so much more criminal than Georgian towns in spite of being more prosperous; and so on.

Rule Britannia says:

Nah. This fatalistic horeshit is unwarranted. The Belle Epoque was great. The 1910’s were terrible. The 1920’s were pretty good. The 1930’s and 1940’s were terrible. The 1950’s were great. Some of the 60’s were great. The 70’s were alright in some ways. The 80’s were pretty good in some ways. Most everything since then has been pretty shite, especially after the 911 Coup. The God-Emperor is going to establish His Space Marines and Don, Jr.’s rule, under which mankind will first fly in cars, engineer the first CRISPy humans, and establish the first space colonies, will be the pinnacle of human civilization foretothence, assuming AI doesn’t kill us all for failing to make it sooner.

Mister Grumpus says:

(And what happened to “B”, anyway?)

Rule Britannia says:

He stopped being reasonable and started trolling pseudonymously.

Mister Grumpus says:

Wait a minute. As if “B” wasn’t pseudonymous enough already? He started trolling under new usernames also?

Rule Britannia says:

Yes.

peppermint says:

B couldn’t enter the alt-right gravity well

Cloudswrest says:

Speaking of technological decline, I went on to Amazon today and tried to order some butane (to refill my modified Thermacell cartridges). A warning came up, “This item cannot be shipped to your selected location.” And I’m thinking, “WTF, is this some new hazmat shipping issue?” And the answer is NOOO. In California pure (unoderized) butane is now a semi-controlled substance. It seems butane is the preferred solvent for extracting hash oil from marijuana. And there have been a couple of “incidents” (i.e. explosions). Seems it’s only various local jurisdictions right now as Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a statewide ban ( https://thejointblog.com/bill-add-butane-controlled-substance-vetoed-california-governor/ ). Pretty soon all non-approved (e.g. non-government contracted research) use of other than the most ubiquitous mundane substances will be illegal.

[…] 25. America is suffering through technological decline [Link] […]

Cloudswrest says:

Fascinating (in the political sense, not technological) recent article in JAMA on testing the therapeutic value Vitamin C on treating sepsis.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2752063?guestAccessKey=62db20f8-8ba0-4199-8a8c-de3b07be8551&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=100119

Basically the authors of the study created a list of sepsis related metabolic parameters, none of which were affected by Vitamin C infusion, so the conclusion of the study was:

Conclusions and Relevance In this preliminary study of patients with sepsis and ARDS, a 96-hour infusion of vitamin C compared with placebo did not significantly improve organ dysfunction scores or alter markers of inflammation and vascular injury. Further research is needed to evaluate the potential role of Vitamin C for other outcomes in sepsis and ARDS.

But here’s the kicker. But here’s the kicker! The study authors state, in an understated section, that the death rate for the Vitamin C cohort was cut in half!!!! And cute ICU days.

At day 28, mortality was 46.3% (38/82) in the placebo group vs 29.8% (25/84) in the vitamin C group (χ2 = 4.84; P = .03; between-group difference, 16.58% [95% CI, 2% to 31.1%])

WTF! I guess since this wasn’t what they were paid to look for they only mentioned it in passing so as to give some respect for the truth.

jim says:

If they said that Vitamin C was effective in sepsis, would not have passed peer review, so if you want to publish something that matters in a peer reviewed journal, you hide it in the body of the article on the usually correct assumption that peer reviewers rarely read most of the article.

By and large peer reviewers only read sections labelled “Key points”, “Abstract”, “Summary”, and “Conclusions”, so it is very common in the peer reviewed literature to say one thing in those sections, and something radically different in the body of the article.

If it really high explosive, as in “Root of the phylogenetic tree of human populations.”, you stick it in the tables. Peer Reviewers never read tables.

BC says:

Why the war on Vitamin C?

jim says:

It is war on every substance that is medically effective, but not under a patent owned by a business in the western hegemony.

Cloudswrest says:

Example where real science, with results, is penalized. This is a nation where people eat aborted fetuses, so I find it hard to believe they were intrinsically against it. The real reason is Western outrage/pressure.

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/chinese-scientist-who-created-first-gene-edited-babies-sentenced-3-years-prison

[…] these lines, here at home, we see increasing evidence of both organizational and technological decline. A nation that once built skyscrapers, world-class universities, beautiful highways, and […]

[…] these lines, here at home, we see increasing evidence of both organizational and technological decline. A nation that once built skyscrapers, world-class universities, beautiful highways, and […]

[…] these lines, here at home, we see increasing evidence of both organizational and technological decline. A nation that once built skyscrapers, world-class universities, beautiful highways, and […]

[…] these lines, here at home, we see increasing evidence of both organizational and technological decline. A nation that once built skyscrapers, world-class universities, beautiful highways, and […]

[…] these lines, here at home, we see increasing evidence of both organizational and technological decline. A nation that once built skyscrapers, world-class universities, beautiful highways, and […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *