Russia, China & The Future | Prof. John Gray

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techstepgenr8tion
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15 May 2022, 4:47 pm

Always great to see a new interview with this guy, this time weighing in on Ukraine, Russia, China, and what he sees as the permanent changes to global order:


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16 May 2022, 8:07 pm

Oh dear.Chomsky recently got angry about all the increased military spending because of Russia- while the real Russia is stumbling over Ukraine. Hardly a Blitzkrieg by any means.

Now Gray, with the prospectbof the Russian Federation disintegrating like Yugoslavia into a civil war - but a nuclear civil war.

On a more amusing note... Have you tried finding anything from Edward Snowden since the war broke out? - he's been quiet and the American propaganda machine is calling it the final nail in the coffin- obviously he's been on Putin's payroll all along.
So, the guys threatening Snowden with life in prison are trying to tell me the guy who fled for his life and found refuge in an autocratic nation is not going to anger the autocrat there -where would he flee to, from the autocrat? The "free" world?


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techstepgenr8tion
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16 May 2022, 8:39 pm

shlaifu wrote:
On a more amusing note... Have you tried finding anything from Edward Snowden since the war broke out? - he's been quiet and the American propaganda machine is calling it the final nail in the coffin- obviously he's been on Putin's payroll all along.
So, the guys threatening Snowden with life in prison are trying to tell me the guy who fled for his life and found refuge in an autocratic nation is not going to anger the autocrat there -where would he flee to, from the autocrat? The "free" world?

Good question.

TBH I really haven't looked for Snowden for a while. I got the impression he was one of those people who had a niche experience and perspective which is really deep in terms of NSA and what not but I never felt like he was someone who I'd want to chase down for answers on global politics. To some degree Glenn Greenwald can be entertaining to listen to but even there I'd still rather run it past an Ian Bremmer or someone of the like. John Gray sort of connects the philosophic and poetic with the political, economic, military, ie. master synthesist.


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17 May 2022, 6:23 am

Yeah, Snowden is no philosopher, I merely thought of him recently and wondered how he was - being stuck in Russia and all.

Yes, Gray is a master synthesist - which leaves him to a kind of healthy pessimism. As it usually does when you combine economics and history with any optimistic ideas.

I can't help but picture the divine mecha-bezos, mecha-musk and mecha-zuckerberg sitting on olympus mons on mars and steering human armies into war, for their amusement, like greek gods playing starcraft.
Gods named Jeff, Mark and Elon...


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techstepgenr8tion
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17 May 2022, 8:23 pm

Speaking of Elon and company I couldn't sleep last night and ended up throwing on All-In (Chamath Palihapitiya and the guys), and they were interviewing none other.

I get the sense that with uber-wealth the nerd herd has invaded that sphere and you'd probably see these guys saying 'Ok, I we got to Mars, I'm bored already - what's next?'. That could end up with them working on asteroid mining rights in the main belt, trying to see how many decades or centuries they can beat James Corey's Expanse by, maybe launching Tesla Roadsters and landing them on Phobos and Deimos, that's the kind of crap I'd see Elon doing. Bezos I know less about, Zuckerberg, I don't feel like I have a good read on him even after seeing him interviewed a few times (strikes me as someone who could be anyone depending on who he's talking to)

I'm sympathetic with the notion of expanding ourselves out, largely for the classic Eric Weinstein reasons that we're not just stuck spending time with stupid - it's stupid with nuclear warheads. We also need places to send young testosterone in hopes of striking it rich, gaining status, etc., and I'd rather send that to the moon, to Mars, to the main belt, heck to the clouds of Venus even, we're just about out of frontier on our planet and we need a good gold rush of that sort so we aren't all sitting around eyeing each other's stuff and plotting on how to take it.


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18 May 2022, 7:12 am

No human is likely to travel to othe planets anytime soon. Particularly not young people.
Nuclear wars are a threat, but space is itself radioactive. And it's Proton radiation. That's huge particles, not some pesky gamma-radiation.
Elon is simply selling a weird dream, when he talks about asteroid mining.
I mean... Robots will do that. It's a ridiculously dangerous concept anyhow. Who would want to become an asteroid *miner*??? Mining anything, anywhere, is hardly a dreamjob, but Elon talks as if it weren't a highly dangerous job to get resources for someone richer than yourself, who wouldn't want to risk his life getting those resources. ... Elon doesn't imagine asteroid-miner's strikes, does he?
How long do you think the young explorers can take sitting in a confined space, watching the acid rains on venus through a meter-thick window? There won't be Tahitian women waiting, nor ancient artifacts, no dangerous animals. Just rocks and acid lakes of different colors, and atmospheres that can't be inhaled. Did I mention cosmic radiation?
Terraforming will take centuries - centuries of suicide missions. In the meantime, the atmosphere on earth will heat up, making organized human life very difficult, and with it, spending resources on terraforming other planets.

As to the personae of these guys: zuckerberg founded a website where you can rate female students' fuckability. Niw he's running a website through which slave trades and genocides are organized and which gets populist leaders into office. It's probably best for him to pretend to be anyone but himself in public.

Bezos founded a company named relentless.com - an adress that still redirects to amazon. Someone had to tell him that relentless is a weird name for an online book shop, but the guy new what he was doing: crush any competition, become a monopoly. THE monopoly on trade with consumers.
And crush unions on the way.

Elon is the most public, but I'm almost certain he's the least toxic male of the three.


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techstepgenr8tion
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20 May 2022, 1:28 pm

shlaifu wrote:
No human is likely to travel to othe planets anytime soon. Particularly not young people.
Nuclear wars are a threat, but space is itself radioactive. And it's Proton radiation. That's huge particles, not some pesky gamma-radiation.
Elon is simply selling a weird dream, when he talks about asteroid mining.
I mean... Robots will do that. It's a ridiculously dangerous concept anyhow. Who would want to become an asteroid *miner*??? Mining anything, anywhere, is hardly a dreamjob, but Elon talks as if it weren't a highly dangerous job to get resources for someone richer than yourself, who wouldn't want to risk his life getting those resources. ... Elon doesn't imagine asteroid-miner's strikes, does he?


Where this is making sense to me actually, Nate Hagens had a discussion with Dr. Simon Michaux titled 'Minerals and Materials Blindness'. Moon and asteroid mining might be the closest thing to a workaround for us not to have what Nate called the 'Mordor Economy' by the middle if the next decade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pt3ioQuNc

A lot of black pills in this one but some of what stuck out to me:

- Nuclear, even fission, replacing coal and oil is a pipe dream. We have enough uranium to last another 300 at our current rate, if we ramped up nuclear 25x we'd have a few generations worth and be out.
- Nuclear fusion fuels are too rare/expensive to be cost-effective.
- We're really in trouble on rare-earth metals. This is likely to start hitting us noticeably by the end of this decade.

Very low likelihood that we start cost-effectively pulling in ores from the moon or the asteroid belt by the end of this decade but - I can see why it's a critical move.

shlaifu wrote:
As to the personae of these guys: zuckerberg founded a website where you can rate female students' fuckability.

The world might be a better place had he stuck with that.

shlaifu wrote:
Bezos founded a company named relentless.com - an adress that still redirects to amazon. Someone had to tell him that relentless is a weird name for an online book shop, but the guy new what he was doing: crush any competition, become a monopoly. THE monopoly on trade with consumers.
And crush unions on the way.

Yeah, my thoughts aren't warm and fuzzy here either. All of these guys are going to have mixed effects on history, Musk is clearly the biggest visionary/dreamer of the group and time will tell whether SpaceX makes it in any way possible to do heavy industry in space within our lifetimes. Back to Simon Michaux, if he's right it could be the case that each country will have space mining hyper-prioritized while we all enjoy remote Appalachian style living in the first world and possibly far worse in the developing world unless their own geniuses that we brain-drained through H1B visas go back and start helping them plan infrastructure.


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20 May 2022, 9:51 pm

I don't know what "remote Appalachian style" means, I'm European.
Btw. Europe has done relatively well since depleting their own resources, not that there ever was much rare earth mining in this part of the world.
... As long as those brains keep coming, things don't necessarily go downhill fast, I think.
Though, space-mined rate earths might be a bit pricier than central-Chinese or Kongolese metals, I admit


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20 May 2022, 11:37 pm

shlaifu wrote:
I don't know what "remote Appalachian style" means, I'm European.

Sort of tar-paper shack, dilapidated trailers, moonshine and meth labs, sort of what post-apocalyptic would look like if it was just poverty rather than war. Maybe downtown Detroit in the last few decades might be a good urban parallel.

shlaifu wrote:
Btw. Europe has done relatively well since depleting their own resources, not that there ever was much rare earth mining in this part of the world.
... As long as those brains keep coming, things don't necessarily go downhill fast, I think.
Though, space-mined rate earths might be a bit pricier than central-Chinese or Kongolese metals, I admit

Simon pretty much made the case though that any of the solutions we think we have to global warming, CO2, and cutting back on oil, coal, and LNG cost more rare earths than we have available - not that we're set to stick with oil, coal, and LNG, more like those are about to get scarce enough too that the days of cheap energy, or in Nate's terms our economy having 500 billion virtual fossil workers, is going to be gone and energy of any kind will be much more difficult, much more expensive to come by.


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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin