That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them.

I feel like so much of the debate misses this forest for the trees. Sure, X regime is awful. How does valued ally Saudi compare? It’s at best an often-decisive factor in whether to be nice to someone or not.

Edit: Another good one:

There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad.

Even if you only care about economics, continuing the war just has to be personally cheaper for an official than ending the war. And then there’s tons of coercion, ego and ideology in the mix as well, and sometimes raw irrationality.

Early on in this, there were oil traders talking about how nothing will even disrupt oil because it’s too important. That’s replacing history with a fanfic you wrote, basically. Same vibe as the 90’s when the world decided free markets always become a democracy.

Interesting. What’s the strategy here? Just “weaken Iran”? Is there some hopium that an escalation wouldn’t see them obliterated?

I’m sure they know as well as anyone else that actually bombing them out of existence isn’t realistic.

Edit: Maybe they’re just noticing that they’ve indefinitely lost free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, if it ends now.

Goes to show, there’s such a thing as government intervention making housing get too cheap. At least, relative to other things like cemetery plots.

Yup. They actually have little interest in if the Middle East is functional in any way, shape or form. If anything they’d prefer it be ruined in every way possible.

Just bombing it and then walking away serves them very well.

If you’re thinking of protein design it is, just with a sequence instead of natural language text. Although it’s not just a straight LLM, there’s some kind of physics awareness engineered in as well.

Anything that’s fuzzy and impossible to automate with traditional algorithms, but that also has a reasonably high tolerance for error. It just makes up stuff a good portion of the time, you see.

However, I’ve found some benefits with AI. For example, I’m chatting with ChatGPT on credit cards, because it is something I may lean towards getting into. It’s helping me better understand than most people have tried explaining to me. Simply because it is giving me a more stream-lined response than people just beating the bush.

Watch out, personal finance is not one of those things.

The very first? Uhh, something in prehistory. Maybe neanderthals did them, maybe they were part of how neanderthals went away. There’s a couple genetic near-total replacements in recent British prehistory, for a more concrete example. The mesolithic residents would have been black and blue-eyed.

Rome did a genocide or two, the Byzantines did things to the Bulgars that probably qualify. I’m tempted to say the Mongols, because of the fame, but that’s probably not an example. I don’t know if they targeted any ethnic group selectively, and even in sources from people who hated them it’s pretty clear they were relatively tolerant.

I mean, it was hardly the first European genocide.

This is why people don’t like the oppression Olympics. It immediately becomes about who you can make lose them.

Have a look at the list. Most won’t even get through the top 10 before finding a guy that just quietly enjoys having unfathomable wealth, and that you’ve never heard of.

A few use their wealth for (attempted) good or evil, and they tend to get noticed more. You might know Peter Thiel, but he’s all the way down at like 170th or something.

If we’re doing Olympics probably, yeah. It might be top 20 but there’s a whole lot of world and a whole lot of history. The one that happened in Europe is the one European and European-like countries took notice of, though.

It’s great that we learn so much about it, and the fact that people just like us did it. Simply burying ugly things is the natural tendency. It’s also given us a framework to understand earlier genocides, and genocides in distant modern places, like Israel or Rwanda, as they happen.

but I think it’s fair to say that the transatlantic slave trade was the most cruel and inhuman form of slavery.

I can think of other contenders, actually, but Sparta and Russia are both retconned as white (before the concept existed). Maybe something in east Asia, or the Middle East. Any society with a supermajority of slaves is a good candidate to have some of the same rules in place.

I think the biggest contender for worst crime against humanity was the Native American genocide.

I mean, they also did that in Australia, for example, and there’s tons of similar events in prehistory we can see through sudden shifts in genetic makeup.

Genocides aren’t rare, and since the Americas were a bit more sparsely populated I’m not even sure that’s the biggest one.

I’m guessing afraid to contradict the US probably fits in there, too.

So is Ghana’s. Haiti was also founded by a slave rebellion.

Yeah, but it wasn’t hereditary in Rome, lots of slaves did manage to achieve freedom, anyone could end up a slave and it was always a minority of the population. It was still messed up and they still abused them really badly or fatally at times, but it wasn’t as bad as the American style of slavery.

Sparta’s style was closer, though, and there’s other examples; it’s not like the system was without precedent. It also raise the whole question of the medieval and Arab slave trades. There isn’t really a good demarcation between them and the Atlantic trade, and of course they themselves would have roots in classical times.

Beyond slavery, there have been marauders like the Huns or the Khans, who would attack a city, and kill every single living thing, and then move on the the next one.

There’s reasonable evidence the Mongols, at least, liked to kill civilians, but you have to be careful about taking the historical accounts of their enemies at face value. Unlike in many of the wars between agricultural civilisations, both sides didn’t have literature of their own for us to draw from.

Yeah, there’s more than a whiff of revisionism going on here. Not that they’re wrong about the specific issue.

It should be Haiti putting forward the motion, probably.

So it’s pretty definitionally oppression Olympics, but I feel like the slave trade is a decent contender. It lasted centuries; maybe more depending a bunch of history that’s still up in the air. The Holocaust (for example) only went on for a few years.

I’m not sure Ghana has hands as clean as they’re implying, though. The victims of the transatlantic slave trade had to (ahem) leave Africa entirely, and usually it wasn’t the Europeans catching and selling them on their own.

It says something interesting about the economics if, even with the massive penalty of the exponential rocket equation, just paying more crew and shipping more stuff by boat comes out as not worth it.

TBF bears are pretty great. Bears probably win over women, too.

So what ever happened to floating launchpads? Did they really work that poorly?