301–310 of 452 posts
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By the time your nukes get to the silos, they will most likely be empty already though.
Which is the reason you want to have more nukes than they have silos - to be able to hit all of them at once in a surprise attack (also called "first strike").
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Actually the global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty ). We have made untold advances in the medical sciences (hello MRNA vaccines), we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights (well, primarily in the West a…
I think you have missed the point. Please see my response to "lamontcg" in this thread for some rebuttal. Note that it is not just Sale (though of course he is quite extremist in his views) who has pointed to the deleterious effects of our Technology, Social systems etc. which may lead to "Collapse" of our Civilization; you also have Nassim Taleb, Jacques Ellul, Michael Ruppert espousing similar arguments in differen…
Taken globally, and looking at purchasing power. Things have been massively improving for the very poorest. Because developing countries are doing just that, developing.
Inequality and poverty are two distinct things. Poverty is having lack of access to things you need. Inequality is becoming a big issue, and poverty is far from being solved. There certainly are opportunities to solve both problems. But the depth of poverty for a lot of humans has lessened the last few years, and that is undeniably a good thing.
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Which is the reason you want to have more nukes than they have silos - to be able to hit all of them at once in a surprise attack (also called "first strike").
Which won't save you against their SSBN… Granted, they have much less warheads in submarines than in silos, but that's still far enough to obliterate every city above 100.000 inhabitant in your country.
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There is a pretty good chance that the period of 2022-2035 or so will be a lot worse than the 2008-2015 one.
I would like to know why you would think that. In US terms it seems clear that financial support in excess of that available in 2009 onwards will be provided. Vaccines are being delivered and economic activity will increase as the fear of COVID-19 subsides. Is this based on political gridlock after the next set of US midterms? Something not COVID-19 related?
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Which is the reason you want to have more nukes than they have silos - to be able to hit all of them at once in a surprise attack (also called "first strike").
Which won't save you against their SSBN… Granted, they have much less warheads in submarines than in silos, but that's still far enough to obliterate every city above 100.000 inhabitant in your country.
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Maybe because silos are an important target for the attacking side? So you want to have many in order to reduce the risk of being left without arms in case your enemy attacks first?
Absolute madness, you and your enemy will be dead anyway from the fallout and nuclear winter.
Bernard Brodie, naval strategist, figured this all out as the inevitable endpoint of nuclear weapons in 1946.
People have been trying to get around it ever since, but there is no way around it. Disarm, and a handful of nukes rule the world. If armed, the only way to avoid war is to make it utterly irrational.
And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_str...
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> in 1985 the USA had 21,000+ nuclear weapons, USSR 39,000+. This is one of the facts from this era which seems completely irrational to me. Considering the damage each one of these devices can do why do you need so many. Lets presume you're in fact a genocidal maniac (i didn't say the roleplaying would be difficult America) 1 bomb per enemy military installation and 1 bomb per population centre over 100k population…
Why do you need the other 18,000 bombs? Every bomb must be purchased from the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society. The same who originally bamboozled Truman into damning our species. Your question is equivalent to "why do they want more money?"
This kind of conspiracy thinking utterly ignores the horrifying logic of MAD. Read a bit about Bernard Brodie, pre-eminent strategist, he laid it all out for why deterrence was sadly the only way to go and that we must live in a state of mutually assured destruction.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_str...
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I am from Latin America though and have a 0.025 USD / year tuition on my current math undergrad education, public healthcare, and a more robust social security net overall.
Sure. I'm a capitalist and free marketeer, but support social security systems and even public health care. I think the US goes too far, particularly it's health care system is appalling, but I have to admit it's thin employment protections do make it a lot more flexible and responsive to economic conditions. Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe, it was a whole year ahead of u…
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The US is just one country and we're talking about the future of humanity as a whole. Here in the UK we've eliminated more than half our carbon emissions from energy generation, and generally the US is lagging far behind a lot of other countries. Covid aside, economic and health improvement trends globally have been incredibly positive. Since 1995 about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. That d…
>Since 1995 about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty That is a great soundbite for the news but is it actually as great as it sounds? If we take it as fact that "one billion humans have been lifted out of extreme poverty" what about how many are in extreme poverty? Note that how many is outside extreme poverty doesn't say anything about the amount in extreme poverty, just that more are now above…
From: https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality
And I think you’re underestimating the marginal utility of going from $1.90 to $3 — both would suck for someone with a baseline of Western expenses, but it is the difference between a literal hand-to-mouth life of subsistence farming in a shack, versus a family that all works being able to collectively afford to rent a basic concrete flat with terrible plumbing on an unpaved street (citation: my ex took me to Nairobi a few years ago, we met one of her local friends, the friend’s flat was about $800/year to rent, $800/year is the increased income from two people going from $1.9 to $3 per day).
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>For most people the economy is not working for them. For most people in the world, they are quite a bit richer than their ancestors, even by 50 years ago. In fact, the number pulled from poverty over the past 50 years is astounding. Even in rich places like the US, the poor today are vastly richer than 50 years ago. Median wages are at all time highs as well. So how do you conclude "for most people" (which I take to…
Wtf? Who cares what the median wage is? People can’t afford health care or housing. Have you been outside in any major city recently? There is a homeless crisis that is truly shocking going on around all of us.
The median is simply much more indicative of how Americans fare.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...
