Mr. S.T.A.R.

Some core Mr. STAR thoughts summarized: Social disorder produces tangible costs in loss of efficiency and general malaise. The biggest rewards of modernity will be reaped by stable societies with minimal social disorder costs. One of the most significant resources a state can possess is trust. State trust is incredibly difficult to build and very easy to burn. Uncertainties created by modern technological progress are best belayed by state trust. The key to success is motivating your own base while demotivating your opponents base. The best way to engage in hard power competition is to improve your inter fundamentals first. The biggest challenge political movements face is motivation and organization of their base. The most important factor in any endeavor is the development of ‘NCOs’/‘Cadres’ because this is the group which motivates organizes the base. An organization that can develop a highly motivated group of cadres can punch radically far above its weight. The defining feature of post-COVID life is everyone forgetting how to do shit. The most important thing we’ve forgotten is how to do politics. Understanding codes of laws is incredibly powerful. Understanding how to meaningfully change them is even more powerful. The future can best be understood as the mixing of a handful of accumulative trends influenced by a handful of remarkably talented people. The internet makes it easier to be one of those talented people than ever before, it also makes it easier to make yourself irrelevant than ever before. Engaging in controversy and provocation provides an illusion of relevance. Positive trends and victories beget more positive trends and victories; negative trends and loses beget more negative trends and losses IOW: most things are cyclical feedback loops. ‘Civilization’ itself is a feedback loop: growth and accumulation begets socially positive behavior which begets more growth and accumulation. The inverse also applies. Social media and the internet amplify the effects of these feedback loops. This makes decivilizing behavior at even smal levels more dangerous than ever before. Strong convictions loosely held is a good principle. At the state level this manifests as intense policy that’s highly reactive to feedback. Politics and governance are simultaneously a science, an art, and a religion. ‘Industrial civilization’ is really a process of socialization and a set of social values. The primary economic goal of the state should be removing barriers towards optimization/efficiency improvements. Established interests and firms are generally the opponents of real economic growth because it represents a threat to their position. Industry is, in many ways, the noblest endeavor. It is also often self-destructive.

to add to this: the vast majority of babies ever born were allowed to sleep on their chests (often on top of their mother), a position in which they *explicitly sleep better* in 1992, some arrogant doctors decided that this deep sleep was the reason some infants were dying (likely a correlation/causation disaster), and recommended that every parent of every child put them to sleep on their back, explicitly because they don't sleep as well and are closer to an awake state in that position so from 1992 forward, parents of new babies have been scared into putting their perfectly healthy babies to sleep in a position that makes their sleep less restful and shorter, thus making life for parents with a newborn significantly more challenging

Cybersecurity is something I’ve literally never spent much time learning about. And probably I should change that. But I’m curious, is there such thing as provably secure software, or is security always relative to state of the art hacking technology?

have “scientists” ever considered that maybe they know everything they need to already

There are two kinds of people: those willing to do whatever it takes to make passive income and those who are not

Feminist Frau reportedly caught on video in Lebanon screaming “death to America”

now yuo see…

a lot of people are like “man the great thing about NYC is that where else will you have a gazillionaire and a crackhead shitting his pants ON THE SAME SUBWAY” and it’s like no actually the crackhead can just be eliminated from that scenario and nothing would be lost

Brett Kavanaugh, a man in his 50s, had been valedictorian of his high school, at Yale College and a star student at Yale Law, had clerked for the Supreme Court, had a top career as an appellate lawyer and federal judge and a pristine reputation, and then a random woman from the town he grew up in claimed he had groped her at a party 35 years earlier when they were in high school. Kavanaugh didn’t try to argue that the incident was consensual. He didn’t claim he remembered things differently than she did. He immediately stated that he had never even met the accuser. Denying ever meeting the accuser is a much stronger claim than merely denying assaulting her, and much easier to refute. After Kavanaugh made this denial, Christine Blasey-Ford no longer had to prove he had sexually assaulted her to scuttle his nomination, she only had to prove that the two of them had attended a party together at which such an assault might have occurred. She was unable to do so. She did not know whose house the alleged assault occurred at. None of the people she claimed attended the party corroborated any aspect of her account. Leland Keyser, a friend of Blasey-Ford’s, who the accuser claimed was at the alleged party, said she recalled no such event and had never met Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh produced a detailed calendar he had kept during the summer Blasey-Ford alleged she was assaulted, which included his whereabouts of every weekend night and listing who he was with. Kavanaugh argued that he could alibi himself and provide witnesses for any night Blasey-Ford claimed she might have been at a party with him. Blasey-Ford responded that she did not know the date of her assault and was not entirely certain it even occurred that year. Instead of being seen as persuasive, Kavanaugh’s calendar was mocked in both mainstream and social media because the reason he kept it was for a drinking contest he was having with his friends. Nearly a decade later, there is still not a single shred of proof or a single witness who will corroborate the claim that Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey-Ford were ever in the same room before she testified at his confirmation hearing. Nonetheless, people like Nick Kristof still claim Kavanaugh was “credibly accused” of sexually assaulting this woman.

Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s family is putting huge chunks of the empire on sale, quickly building up a vast stockpile of cash. Here’s why. bloomberg.com/news/newslette…

The rusting colossus that was once the massive and vastly productive Bethlehem Steel, on the Lehigh Valley in Eastern Pennsylvania.

fuck…

bad heuristics for determining truth alert ⬇️

Everything MPU posts about data centers is complete garbage. They have zero respect for their audience. Literally no one here is losing power. This tweet is a complete lie. What's actually happening is that a supply contract between two utilities is ending, and the small one is just buying power from elsewhere, and this was all expected to happen since 2009. The company that serves homes on the California side of Lake Tahoe is a small utility called Liberty. Liberty buys about 75% of its electricity from a much larger utility, NV Energy in Nevada, and generates the other 25% itself from solar farms it owns. Liberty then sells that to 49,000 customers. NV Energy has told Liberty it will stop selling them wholesale power after May 2027. It's kind of like Liberty's a coffee shop that buys beans and sells coffee to customers. The customers are the homes, and the beans are the electricity it buys from NV Energy or makes itself. This is like your local coffee shop ending a contract with a specific bean company and started buying the beans from somewhere else. It doesn't stop you from buying coffee. Why is their contract ending with NV Energy? NV Energy selling to Liberty was understood as transitional since it started in 2009. Long story short, NV Energy was basically Liberty's only wholesale option, but a new transmission line opening in May 2027 gives Liberty access to a much wider Western market, with among other things a much larger share of solar and wind and hydro. That's the whole story here. Ending the contract with NV Energy and opening up this much wider pool with much more renewable energy was the plan here completely separate from data center demand. NV Energy is ending the contract right as the new high-voltage transmission line comes online, and is opting not to extend past that date. In its filing with California regulators, Liberty said NV Energy cited growing data center demand as one of several reasons it would not offer another extension. But the town will have the high-voltage transmission at that point. No one's losing power. This was always the plan. This is like if a local coffee shop were buying beans from Starbucks, and then started buying beans from somewhere else instead, and the headlines all saying "Nearly 50,000 people have been told that Starbucks will stop providing coffee to them, because it's redirecting it elsewhere." MPU just chooses to send out these unbelievable lies and gets millions of views every time.

(it’s bullshit and the citation goes nowhere lmao)

it’s astounding how you can just throw anything into a vaguely scientific graph and people will eat that shit up

@breakingbaht this is just completely fake

Hypergamy looks horrible for both sexes. Either youre the top 1% of aristocratic males pull Cruel Intentions shit or youre the ~50% of women who will kick their current boyfriend to the curb for another crack at that guy. It's probably the more genuinely disappointing reality about humans.

@Xilo_K “what did you do”

I didn’t take the @favelaoverlord pledge and now my life is over