Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

They don't talk about it but the military has to consider forcibly closing the border to prevent invasion after a mass ecological/economic disaster.

https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...

It's long, so here's the relevant part quoted at length:

>

There’s an anthropologist friend of mine, a guy called Steve LeBlanc–he runs the Peabody Museum in Harvard–who wrote a book once called “Constant Battles” about pre-civilized human beings and how they actually lived. Not the fantasy version, where they lived in, you know, the Garden of Eden and wore flowers in their hair, but the real ancient world where food shortages, including ones that you could die from, were a regular occasion. And his rule of thumb is “people always raid before they starve.”

“Raid the neighbours.”

Now, it doesn’t automatically/inevitably follow that large civilized society will do the same as small hunter-gatherer bands, but it’s the same people, you know. So the military think that there’s going to be a lot of work for them. I mean I can’t discern, and I don’t see how you would separate their motives into the ‘good ones’–they just want to be ready to deal with trouble–and the ‘bad ones’–they’re looking for a justification for their existing budget and the present justifications are getting a bit thread-worn so we need some new ones…I can be quite cynical about this on occasion; but I have taken my pills today.

But they’re right. That–I mean, you talk to the US military for example, their, I’d say, obsession in the planning. I mean, not your average grunt or his, you know, the “2nd platoon officer” but in the thinking parts of the military: the obsession with Mexico. Because there’s a 2,000 mile/3,000 kilometers (I’m in Canada) 3,000 kilometer border between Mexico and the United States. There are a hundred million people in Mexico, another 50 million south of them in Central America; the farms there are going to dry up and blow away.

There’s already a well established pattern: when you’re in deep trouble and you can’t feed your family, head north. There is an existing arrangement on the US border which might be described as “catch some, let some go.” I mean it’s–it’s not really fortified. It looks pretty impressive in the cities where people can see it, but if you drive 10, 15 kilometres out of town east or west along the border, you’re down to three strands of barbed wire and a dirt patrol track with a vehicle down it every 4 hours. It is actually meant to allow lots of people to get through because cheap illegal labor is what keeps American agro-business profitable, and the reason that it’s cheap is because the workers are illegal and they can’t bargain. So there is a reason for all this–though not one we can speak of in front of the children. This provides a safety valve for Mexicans, the Mexican state. It provides cheap labor for American farmers and, you know, the flow is maybe half a million a year, a million a year, and half of them go home again after the harvest. We can deal with that–there’s 300 million people in the United States; drop in the bucket. But try 5 million a year, because things have fallen apart and there’s no food in Mexico.

What do you do at 5 million a year? Well, the US Army’s convinced that the Congress will tell them to close that border–really close it–and they can do that! It’s absolute nonsense–though you’ll hear it often enough in the States, they go: “Ooh, I dunno…2,000 miles of border; we could never shut that–”

Bullshit.

Iron Curtain! You remember the Iron Curtain?

But the dirty secret is that you can only shut a border if you’re willing to kill people.

ENDQUOTE

oh yeah i forgot the US is responsible for everything.

> how is the US/Mexico border a "defense" issue?

Well, whether you agree with it or not, part of the justification is that if anybody can cross easily, terrorist groups will, too. IIRC, the 9/11 hijackers didn’t fly into the US since we were looking for them, they flew into Canada and crossed the border (although Canada’s not Mexico, of course…)

Probably for the same reason Fanta exists and IBM sold tech to the nazis.

It's hearing things like this that make me regret having supported Luckey on his Kickstarter. I had followed him for a few years on the MTBS3D forum when he was experimenting with various HMD prototypes (usually modding the heck out of the Forte VFX-1). He just seemed like a kid with a dream, and the will and ability to make it happen - and potentially revive VR for "Round 2".

I suppose he did do that, and while I didn't like the "sell-out" to FB and Zuck - I couldn't blame him, either. Then it seemed like things went downhill from there.

I don't have any problem with someone being a republican or a conservative, but I can't and couldn't understand why someone would support a person like our current POTUS. To me, it would be similar to continue to voice support for Manson while saying "well, it isn't like he killed anybody himself, so it's ok" - umm, no - it's not ok.

...and now this.

I sometimes wonder if we humans will ever get over this artificial border fetish we have. I don't have problems with property rights, to a certain level, but I'm not sure it has really worked well at the large scale level. All it has seemed to do is create some level of tension at best, and outright violence at worst. I am not certain that we as a species can continue on this path for much longer, not without some very terrible things occuring.

So - while I would prefer a "monitored solution" to border control over physical imposing measures, my real preference would be for us to all work toward eliminating these national-level borders completely. Instead, it seems like we're going the opposite direction, even online, and erecting virtual barriers to separate us from each other, instead of working to understand each other and work together on solving our world problems.