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Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

I was reading the journals of Gareth Jones about his time spent in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and find remarkable similarities to this sort of thing.

The government took over, for example, the manufacture and maintenance of tractors, and also selected people nearly at random to maintain them.

The one guy he interviewed said something to the extent that the tractors barely last a year before breaking. The people who designed them were incompetent, the people who used them were incompetent, and the people who maintained them were incompetent. Not that it mattered, the oil they used was basically sludge.

I'm getting to the point where I'm struggling to believe Hanlon's Razor. Especially when the most extreme environmentalists seem to align with Thanos' ideas about resolution to climate issues.

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Late Soviet regime produced so much farm hardware as if it wanted to outright lay siege to the field and storm it by having greater numbers.

Most of it went rotting. I remember a village school with a large yard full of half-disassembled tractors and combines. Apparently the students were supposed to learn to use all the stuff and then give the field no rest. In reality it would just rot.

I don't think you should label all that people incompetent. They were mostly very practical in solving their immediate problem while having no freedom to rethink it. The system sucked and people were just trapped in it.

I didn't take incompetent as an insult, but in its straightforward, descriptive sense: the people were not competent at the jobs they were assigned to (and, presumably, weren't given sufficient help in becoming competent)

I have to disagree. The tractor-builders were very competent in building 100,000 new tractors each year when operating on vastly insufficient resources with apathetic workforce; and making sure these tractors could leave the factory gates on their own. In short, they did fulfill their plan.

Would they be happier producing 10,000 tractors that would actually last, instead? Maybe. Would they be able to do that right away? No, but with some practice it could be done. Could they produce better tractors with the constraints that they had? I don't think so.

You will undoubtedly see the same pattern all over the corporate world.

Thanos’ ideas about everything were extremely silly. A halving of population would do nothing on any time scale. A small blip easily recovered by reproduction. People deserve better writing, even in comic book movies.

The original rationale for Thanos made a lot more sense: he simped for Death, like the concept of death was a woman in the Marvel universe. He thought half the universe's souls would make a perfect offering for her and would impress her enough to make her want to be with him.

It's outrageously comic-book-y, but may as well lean into the illogic.

That makes much more sense, I wish they had stuck with that.

I thought they would, considering they introduced the Goddess of Death in Thor: Ragnarok, but...NOPE. Cate Blanchett delightfully hamming it up as a supervillian only lasted one film.

Death is a separate character from Hela. So the possibility is still there.

They even teased it at the end of The Avengers: the Chitauri leader tells Thanos "to challenge [humans] is to court death", at which time Thanos grins eagerly. But with Earth-199999's Thanos dead, they're going to have to invoke some multiversal malarkey if they want to develop that storyline now.

Real life despots and fanatics are usually quite a bit crazier and less coherent than Thanos. As usual you have to tone it down to make it believable in fiction. A realistic depiction of a genocidal fanatic would be too stupid or insane to be believable.

See: Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, ISIS, Kim Jong Un, and numerous other examples.

If they were rational they would not be despots and fanatics. Unfortunately charismatic lunatics command followings. Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc).

Cult leaders are good cases too: L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Keith Raniere, etc. These people would be as bad as the worst despots if they actually had power over more than a few people.

Thanos' line is more rational than this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu

Reading _Wizard's First Rule_ right now. "Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc)." That's pretty much the premise of the book.

Like it best from the series. In a way, each whole volume of the series is to describe one sentence.

> A halving of population would do nothing on any time scale. A small blip easily recovered by reproduction.

The population was half of 2020 in 1973 (1). Emissions were also half of now back then (2). That’s nearly 30 years of runway that Thano’s solution would provide. With today’s technology and rapid iteration, we could definitely do something better for climate change.

I’m not endorsing the method, but merely disagreeing with your assertion.

(1) https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

(2) https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...

Halving the emissions today would buy us only a couple of years until 2° warming becomes completely unpreventable.

This is simply not true.

And how would you go about halving the population? Who should die?

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