Hungry ghost

A few hours ago, I wanted to make a post about this quote, which I recorded in a text file as follows:

戰爭無情，和平無價
War is ruthless; peace is priceless.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210613113511/https://www.ydn.com.tw/news/newsInsidePage?chapterID=1312831

via https://forum.skalman.nu/viewtopic.php?t=50050

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/新北八二三臺海戰役紀念碑

https://www.kinmen.gov.tw/News_Content2.aspx?n=98E3CA7358C89100&sms=BF7D6D478B935644&s=E28F9203506FEBAE

金門新聞(轉載金門日報)
戰爭無情和平無價

About the quote, and about the subject of the first article where I first saw it mentioned. Since the same quote is on a monument that doesn't mention the soldier in the first article, he was probably not the originator of the quote. It talks about him striving to teach his family to act in good ways; basically, to be nice.

Explorations of iterated prisoner's dilemmas show that the optimal strategy often depends on other existing strategies. A given strategy can be successful in one environment, causing it to increase in frequency, while failing in another. Being 'nice' is a strategy that can fail if everyone else is 'mean', partly because if too many people are mean, the cost of trying to keep track of or punish everyone who is mean is too hard. But there is also the consideration of people simply punishing anyone who deviates from what is thought of as the optimal strategy. Look at the discourse around males being nice towards females in the US: males who do this can be subjected to disparaging terms like "simp", or the somewhat less disparaging term "white knight". Wiktionary says,

3. (figurative, derogatory) Someone who unnecessarily defends someone else.

    1. (informal, derogatory, Internet) A man who defends a woman in debate etc. in an attempt to gain her favour.

    Synonyms: doormat, simp

Urban dictionary also has definitions but for some reason the upvotes and downvotes aren't showing up for me, so I don't know which one people think is the best. One entry:

1) A man who stands up for a womens right to be an absolute equal, but then steps up like a white knight to rescue her any time that equality becomes a burden.

2) A man who Promotes gender equality but practices special privilege for women.

Compare the female in China who bought a house paid for the down payment on a house with the money she got from selling the 20 iPhones that males sent her.

"I can't even find one boyfriend. She can actually find 20 boyfriends at the same time and even get them to buy her an iPhone 7. Just want to ask her to teach me such skills."

So anyway, I just mentioned it for that quote: "War is ruthless; peace is priceless". Note that the original Chinese uses 無, "not", for both parts: "without feelings", and "without price".

The US also treated people terribly during the war in Vietnam. A search for "site:wikipedia.org us vietnam war special forces operations that killed civilians" turns up Tiger Force ("investigations during the course of the war and decades afterwards revealed the unit had committed extensive war crimes against hundreds of Vietnamese civilians") and Phoenix Program. It also turns up Civilian Irregular Defense Group program. The article says (noting that the content in a Wikipedia article is subject to change, and it might sometimes be necessary to check an article's history for its content on the date it was referenced),

Furthermore, he felt that Green Berets members "viewed themselves as something separate and distinct from the rest of the military effort," describing them as "fugitives from responsibility" who "tended to be nonconformist, couldn't quite get along in a straight military system, and found a haven where their actions were not scrutinized too carefully, and where they came under only sporadic or intermittent observation from the regular chain of command."

which seems relevant to the film Apocalypse Now (1979). I'm not praising the film, and it doesn't seem to feature any Green Berets, but there are certainly characters in it that don't act like typical soldiers.

But I mentioned that last article just because I watched most of the film Gran Torino a couple weeks ago. It features Hmong people, with one of them saying that Hmong people are in the US because they helped the south and the US during the war, so they had to leave when they lost.

So: the US might not have done anything during the Iraq war and occupation that was as bad as what Israel has recently done, but it did during the Vietnam War. (Also, shooting at civilian cars that drove too close to military vehicles during Iraq's occupation was bad.) And the US also killed lots of people. As the saying goes.

Lots of people also died in Syrian prisons. Many of them starved to death, rather than being deliberately killed. Maybe the Syrian government simply could not afford to buy food for all of the prisoners during the fighting; Syria spent $2.2 billion on military in 2011, the year the civil war started (population was 23 million), while Israel spent $13 billion on military in the same year (population was 7.8 million, about the population of Wuhan Nanjing in China).

Why doesn't Israel kill people after torturing them, or let them starve? Because the purpose is not genocide. The guards who are mean to Palestinian prisoners are trying to make them think that their situation is bad; that they should not be happy when Gaza has a GDP of $161 per capita or $200 per capita ("a level associated with the poorest low-income countries, and a full 95 percent below the West Bank’s").

If people in Gaza were not happy, they would try harder to fix their situation. (Like, if they were less happy, they might share this idea if they learned of it.) Do people have children when they are not happy?

When people spread information about the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, they are trying to cause an improvement of those people's treatment. But are they trying to end war?

"War is ruthless; peace is priceless."

As always, I spent too long on parts of this post, like finding a reference for Syria's military spending. Started this post over two hours ago.

 

(The following is something I eventually wrote after waiting long enough, instead of just publishing the above.)

I think I also wanted to mention a video? If A Combat Veteran Was A 911 Dispatcher - YouTube

Basically, "shoot the intruder." About 13 years ago, my oldest brother (currently in prison) mentioned a book that I think was On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. After he mentioned the book, I read what was probably the Wikipedia article about it, and said that my response was based on this and that I didn't think the book was worth reading; he seemed to imply he disagreed with my dismissal of it. We discussed the topic as recently as five years ago, when he helped my mum with a drive to a new state (since I couldn't help, lacking a driver's license). I mentioned a battle on a Pacific island where Japanese soldiers came very close to US lines (probably Marines) and expressed skepticism towards the view that a soldier would not shoot someone charging at them with fixed bayonet. In fact, just a couple years ago, shortly before he went to prison, I questioned him on whether the Ukraine conflict had changed his views about the issue.

It seemed to me that his belief that most people would not be willing to kill each other without intense training that overrides human instinct or something was not based on evidence. For example, my oldest brother considers himself to be religious, unlike me. I think he believes that what is commonly called heaven is important. I think that belief in heaven is not based on evidence, and that it is not controversial to say that it is not based on evidence: that religions embrace the lack of evidence for various claims as a positive aspect of religion, rather than taking the position that the lack of what could be called scientific evidence for miracles is a flaw. And so I found it plausible that my oldest brother's views on people's willingness to kill could avoid a thorough and impartial examination of the evidence.

For example, I said regarding the first petition, in 2012, that this was a conversation about whether people were, by nature, good or evil. If people can be convinced to kill other people easily (the question of whether the four people in The Push were convinced to kill someone 'easily' aside), one might say that this would mean people are, by nature, evil. If my brother thought this, he might have thought that it would be more beneficial to anyone for them to think that most people would not kill another human without training to 'dehumanize' an enemy, even if this is false.

I might actually have the opposite position: as a way of making people believe in justice, i.e. punishment for deliberately defecting in a prisoner's dilemma, it's better for society if people think that other people are willing to kill someone when the circumstances call for it.

I tend to believe it's beneficial for an individual to believe things that are true, even though this is not always the case: if I didn't believe this idea would fix problems, I would not be poor right now. Basically, I view the question of whether people are good or evil to be unimportant. Other people think it's important. But, like, suppose that someone wanted to determine whether I was good or bad. Sherine said in 2013 that she wasn't sure if she wanted to throw me under a bus or save me from being thrown under a bus. If a person who wanted know whether I was good or bad has not yet concluded that I'm bad, it doesn't mean that I'm not bad: it could just mean that I am smart enough to act in a way that will appear good to other people, and that I am using like Stanislavski's system to act as a good person. (The 'broken mask' in 【GUMIオリジナル】 正義粉砕 【NfN】, but the concept also relates to the whole "are you happy if someone thinks you are?" question.)

I occasionally think about this: a stupid person who attempts to lie will often make mistakes. So even if you trust them at one point, eventually they will probably make a mistake, and at that point get punished. So trusting them might sort of seem fine. Or, a stupid person who tries to determine if other people are lying will often make mistakes in their conclusions, both false positives and false negatives: the cost of making this determination is higher than for a smart person to make the determination. Rather than looking for 'clues', it could be better to rely on reputation, including enforcing changes of reputation based on new evidence.

Also, I was thinking recently: "could a smart AI take over the world?" I recently saw in my bookmarks a video with a title that starts with "Google smokes Olympic mathletes", presumably a progression in the trend that has included "AI does better than 90% of people on college-level exams". But can a smart AI convince people that it's stupid? Can it both convince people that it's stupid and also have agency? Would people let a dumb AI have any power? Would they let a smart AI have any power? Smart people accomplishing things because they look dumb is apparently a thing; I linked a "Columbo solves the Death Note case" video last year, though I think my favorite was [95k views, 4.9k subs, 10 Dec 2025]Love Note: A Death Note Parody - Episode 1 - YouTube. If stupid people support people who have the best interests of stupid people in mind, how could a smart AI convince people that it has this goal, instead of the goal of helping smart people?

Back to the question of Violence. Underestimating other people's potential for violence can have obvious negative consequences. What about overestimating their potential for violence? In 2020, there was some kind of family event I went to. Maybe some relatives were in town, maybe for the death of my last grandparent. I remember asking my youngest sister, regarding Covid-19, whether the family gathering at a restaurant was worth a 0.001% chance of death (or something like that). Her response was, "I don't know."

Topic: sexually transmitted diseases. Many people seem to not care about them. Just like many people seem to not care about a small risk of death: jumping off cliffs into water, or getting into fights, or driving at a high speed on a road, or not following all safety procedures or doing sufficient calculations about loads when using heavy equipment. Note that joining the military when you could end up on a ship that is being targeted by 100 missiles is a calculated risk, in exchange for money or the promise of a protective benefit to people you care about.

So for some people, a 2% chance to die because you decided to wander around city streets at night (or visit a country where you might be kidnapped) is the same as a 1% chance: both are equally effective at deterring the activity. For other people, maybe the 1% chance is acceptable, but the 2% chance would not be, and so overestimating the potential for violence could avoid their death. Or maybe there is a systematic underestimation of the risk in specific situations, such that overestimating the potential that humans have for violence in general leads to a more accurate estimate of the risk of a particular situation, due to cancellation of errors. But systematic errors could just as easily lead to overestimation of risk in particular situations, leading to a compounded error of two overestimations.

There was that poll for teenagers on Reddit, Do you truly consider yourself to be a good person?, and I just remembered these videos, featuring the song Sweet Caroline:

Nick Davis - Jealous Boyfriend Crashes Party: A POV Story - TikTok (Tikvib) 2m likes, by @nickdavisfr

Brooke Monk - Like bruh I'm right here - TikTok (Tikvib) 959k likes, by @brookemonk_

POV: The Quiet Kid #TheManniiShow.com/series - YouTube 2.5m likes, by
@TheManniiShow

After someone with a knife tried to mug me while I was walking to my National Guard armory late at night, I never visited that area at night again. Since I never had any reason to visit it at night again, I'm not sure if I would have considered it an area with an unreasonably high risk of crime, and whether me overestimating the potential that humans have for crime would have stopped me from being outside at night the first time.

I did learn something from it: that someone would act in the way that they did, which included grabbing my backback as I ran from the public street towards the armory, meaning they entered onto the property of the armory. I interpreted it to mean that they did not consider the US military to be an institution that seemed to benefit them, or they would not have tried to rob someone who seemed to be in it. So I can say, "I learned something, so it was not a mistake." But I did also — I think shortly after I wrote the first post on this site and was trying to find somewhere to sleep — avoid someone in a public park who might have been trying to sell me drugs, as I was uncertain if they just wanted to rob me. There is a limit to how much I value new information, if it comes at a risk.

(4 hours 52 minutes to write)

Bad Apple

I am hereby announcing that as long as Greta's Instagram page suggests that there are problems in the world that she cares about that have not been fixed, then I will think that Greta is unhappy.

Also, my sometimes still juvenile sense of humor made me think while I was waking up, of asking for TTS: "Insert your CAC into this slot"

My dream involved being in the military, other soldiers throwing away a bunch of candy and me collecting it while thinking it was more than I could ever eat, passing by a couple female soldiers who were discussing obtaining one of many versions of a 'meme song' that was apparently everywhere, and my worries about whether my ID would be accepted at the cafeteria (dining facility) when it was expired. As I was passing the female soldiers while carrying a bunch of candy in my arms, I broke into a jog to save time, as I often do in real life when traveling short distances outside.

I derived considerable amusement from some of the military branches in this comedy skit saying "CAC", while others said "CAC card": [7.3m views, 25 Feb 2026]How gate guards in each branch check IDs. - YouTube

I have since then thought many more times than was necessary about how it was an example of government not caring about unfortunate interpretations. Just like how I noticed that Trump was following 69 people on Truth Social when I first checked his account.

Also, the word that I was trying to think of to describe the previous post's writings on taxes, was "abstruse".

Taxes

No taxes on overtime extra pay: overtime is the 'worker sacrifices when they work less' possibility in https://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2026/04/encouraging-people-to-work-less-in-way.html.

Criticizing people who want to raise taxes: maybe the conversation is wrong. Instead of saying the purpose of taxes is to avoid more borrowing, people could change to saying that the purpose of taxes is to destroy money that would cause inflation, by taking money from people as fairly as possible. Any conversation about taxes that avoids the topic of inflation is vulnerable to people criticizing the taxes because they don't connect the issues.

Why care about inflation at all? Any government that issues its own money could just eliminate all taxes and accept higher inflation each year. For example, the European Union could give the governments of the 21 countries of the Eurozone money each year so that they would not need to have any taxes. (I was not sure if any states of the EU did not use the Euro after the UK left, until I just looked it up. I am just using information that I learned in the process of writing that sentence.)

(One reason is the cost of making new currency. If there is 2500% inflation over the course of a century (25^(1/100)=1.033 increase per year or 3.3% inflation), so that a US quarter has the purchasing power that a penny once did, do we get rid of all coins smaller than a quarter and use quarters the way that pennies were once used? Quarters are physically much larger, and using a large coin instead of a small coin is a waste. But let's disregard this reason and say that everyone uses digital currency.)

The reason not to do this is the difficulty of determining how to fairly distribute printed money. The EU is a good example. Maybe some countries currently tax 50% of all private income, while others only tax 20%. (Search for "eu tax burden wiki list" gives Tax rates in Europe and List of countries by tax rates, which don't seem to give the overall tax rate. Best would probably be to just look at government spending as a percentage of all spending: Government expenditure, percent of GDP, List of countries by government budget#International_Monetary_Fund. Germany 49%, Norway 48%, France 57%, Ukraine 71%, Netherlands 44%, Bulgaria 37%, China 33%, southern Korea 23%, Thailand 23%, Indonesia 17%.)

So if one country taxes 60% of income (let's say $30k per person, so I don't have to type €), and another taxes 20% ($10k per person), is it fair to give one country $30k per person so they can reduce taxes to zero, while giving the second country just $10k per person?

You could say, "give every country the same money per person. They can still have taxes if they want, on top of that." Like how individual US states cannot go into debt ("Most U.S. states are required by law to balance their budgets. Vermont is the only state without a balanced-budget requirement. States cannot run fiscal deficits like the federal government. Raising debt typically requires legislative or voter approval."), so if they want to spend more, just printing money is not an option.

But this removes effort. With taxes, and no equal distribution by a money-printing bank: a country that manages to produce five times as much can afford to consume five times as much. If every country gets $100k of printed money per person per year, then a country that produces $50k in value per person per year can only consume 50% more than a country that produces $0 value per person per year.

Try to measure the value that people create, and award money based on that: countries have an incentive to lie. Make up some statistics and say that each person creates $1 million in value per year. Without taxes, rewards become disconnected from reality. With taxes, if $1 million of value is being measured, then $1 million is subject to tax.

To people who don't do much thinking, this may all seem somewhat abstract: we are not in a situation where there are no taxes. This is all about explaining why are aren't in that situation even after money stopped being supported by gold (allowing governments to print unlimited money), and why there is a need to destroy money with taxes even though everyone complains about taxes.

I just overheard a sound bite because I wasn't focused on writing, and someone was just saying that stopping commercial traffic is piracy. VENEZUELA OIL TANKERS MUCH? If Iran stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them is piracy, how is the US stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them not piracy? 

With something like this, it's important to realize that the contradiction is not noteworthy; it's just people being inconsistent and not thinking about all possibilities. Just like people who are not good at chess not seeing all the possibilities from a move and therefore not playing as good as a better player.

Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/InnaVishik/status/2044537696576803056

There are plenty of people who studied computer science on their own and became good at it.

These pages look like they will change in the future, to update to newer years:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.htm

If the only job you can get is as a Home health and personal care aide (14% of net new jobs, or 3.4 times as much as the next largest category, Software developers), it doesn't matter if you spent three years learning differential calculus from online resources.

Why do people care what college someone went to? What skilled job is in a shortage in the US that does not have countless people from poorer countries who would want to come to the US to do that job?

CMV: Large-scale unemployment is not a knowledge problem that would be fixed by everyone being more educated.

In the linked tweet, Inna Vishik said, "the structure/accountability of a college environment is crucial for learning anything challenging". The existence of self-taught CS workers is a counter example. CS has historically been a rapidly changing field: there was a joke post I read a few years ago about all the new things someone would need to know in order to do a simple web-related development task. So it can be hard for colleges to keep their curriculum relevant, and so a degree becomes less valuable as an indicator of knowledge.

Whereas math does not change. The joke with physics is that Science Makes Progress Funeral by Funeral: it changes, but slowly. So a degree will definitely be relevant, and so it's easier for employers to make the decision to disregard applications that don't come from someone with a college degree.

For other difficult things, like learning a new language, plenty of people are successful without spending most of their time in formal education.

The quoted tweet, from Dmitrii Kovanikov, is implying that people who do not learn all the free knowledge are less capable. It is not a very useful observation; someone might, at best, use it to convince themselves that it's fine to ignore problems that affect stupid people, the poll that Greta probably did not create.

Another post that makes me look dumb

I said I intended not to say anything for two weeks, no matter what Greta posted on Instagram.

About five hours ago, I set my alarm for 12:00 my local time, with the intention of not going online until then, even though this would have meant a several-hour gap in which any Stories posted by Greta on Instagram would have been deleted before I saw them.

Despite what I said, I'm posting about the Story that Greta posted four hours ago, which I assume is from a video that is not yet showing up on Picuki and I'm too lazy to click the link to view Greta's profile on Instagram.

Greta mentions the report described here:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-antisemitism/

When I was 17 I think, I learned judo at my local community college. I think it counted as an actual class, in contrast to the karate that I learned at a local gym with my aunt until the gym changed the rules so that I would have required a gym membership to continue going. I stopped taking judo once school started, as I was too busy; I might have had my first job by then, as well as doing cross-country running after school and studying for seven Advanced Placement tests and the ten subjects of Academic Decathlon.

One thing that I remember had nothing to do with traditional judo lessons: it was practice with reacting to having a gun pointed at you at close range, which might sound unrealistic to any police officer who knows how fast someone can close 3~6 meters of distance. (Also.) We actually practiced with fake or toy guns, like pushing the front of the gun up while pushing down on the person's elbow.

Anyway, one memorable lesson that I'm sure I've mentioned before: pushing someone, in order to make them situate their feet along a line in the direction of force, so that they become weak in another direction. Just the general concept of controlling someone's reactions.

Why don't people feel a sense of danger at being called anti-Russian?

What about anti-Persian? Or anti-French?

I was thinking earlier about, basically, politics. Like,

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/04/trump-responds-critics-after-posting-christ-like-image/

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116407007495166895

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116408742801619405

The strategy basically is, "make someone look like they are worse than average". For example, worse than the average US president. If everyone always uses this strategy, then it should work about 50% of the time. And for some people, that is an acceptable success rate: high enough that they have no interest in looking for a better use of their time. It's actually sort of like gambling: people don't know if their efforts to make someone look worse than average will succeed in any particular situation, because they try the strategy in many cases where there's a significant chance of failure, and so they get interested in the result.

In contrast: stopping global warming has had a 0% success rate up until the current time, just like all efforts to avoid dying have historically ended in failure. 50% is great compared to that.

___

Update 15 Apr 2026, 21:00

So I just had a thought. When Kanye West got banned from Chirp Club for something related to Jewish people. Suppose that Greta posted the following on Chirp Club:

1) Kill all Muslims

If banned, success. If not banned:

2) Stab all Jewish people in the arm with a Covid vaccine

If not banned, escalate the statements to approach the statement in 1, for science.

This is a strategy that can only be used by someone who is comfortable with being seen by some people as dishonest. In general, I think it's a much less interesting thing to do than sharing the idea.

* Video by 心系小许 had 510k likes on 04 Sep 2025, only up to 511.4k now. Not actually sure if the song says "Kanye West". Would have linked a more energetic performance by ク无感 @96421348752 but it's deleted or hidden on Douyin.

Post that makes me look dumb

Was just having a dream in which there was a female who was probably Turkish. I infer that I knew this in the dream because I asked her if she knew who fancyfenty was. In real life this is a nickname for Rihanna, but in the dream, the person's response was like "that tells me everything I need to know" implying that she was the previous owner of the @fancyfenty Chirp Club account. Anyway, a bit later on in the dream I remembered when in 2013, this person said something to Sherine that mentioned that Sherine was Lebanese, and I think Sherine's response was like, "thanks for remembering what country I'm from."

If those were the words that Sherine used, then I was wrong in thinking that there was ambiguity in "what country Sherine is from". I had been thinking that when I said in 2013 that "if Sherine doesn't share the idea, it means she doesn't care about Lebanon", that it was possible that it wasn't "the country Sherine was from", which I think Sherine had said was one of the only two things she cared about. Since I wasn't sure if it was possible to say that the country Sherine was from, was actually the US or Canada.

But if this response from Sherine to @fancyfenty did use these words, then I was wrong, and I should have known in 2013 that this interpretation was not possible.

Some videos featuring songs by Rihanna:

20141110 雪克杯杯 欣欣 蚊子 笨笨 南港7-11[Shake Baby - We Found Love, Only Girl In The World]

01227 ( 6 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - We Found Love]

01228 ( 7 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - Only Girl in the World]

5374 ( 1 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - We Found Love]

5375 ( 4 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - Only Girl in the World]

No hidden message in the title

I don't know if the following statement is true, but I will assume that it's true until the evidence does not appear to support it:

If no famous person publicly shares the idea, it's because Sherine doesn't want or care if anyone shares it, even though Sherine's family is from Lebanon and Greta recently posted on Instagram about the damage to Lebanese agriculture.

I'm waiting for Greta to make the poll from the post, "I got distracted by lions".

Perceptions

Trump linked a news article: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116403452696175100

This was a trending story on the same site: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/04/hormuz-blockade-europe-mobilizing-against-u-s-not/

Neither the U.S. nor Israel is dependent on oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Around the globe, the U.S. is the primary enforcer of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), maintaining freedom of navigation for all countries. Trump’s request for Europe and other allies to support U.S. freedom-of-navigation patrols in the Strait of Hormuz was rejected.

Someone can actually write this. From Wikipedia:

As of October 2024, 169 sovereign states and the European Union are parties. The United States is among the states that have not ratified the treaty.

I was actually thinking several days ago, "Iran should conduct freedom of navigation patrols near the US." But I don't know if they have any large warships left. And if they did have one, the US would probably just sink it during the freedom of navigation patrol.