Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Economic costs of war

watson.brown.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 618 posts

Re: Economic costs of war

#331

Post by issa »

smegger001 wrote: post #291
ericmay wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Riiiight. With all those ports, infrastructure, and nice easy mountain terrain to navigate. And let’s say China does somehow befriend the Taliban and build all this infrastructure, and import hundreds of thousands of workers that somehow the Taliban doesn’t decide are yet another empire to kick out. What do you think they do with these resources? They make iPhones. That westerners buy. And again, even if they do some…

why bring in hundreds of thousands of workers when China can pay the Taliban to force the Afgans to do it and just send some engineers and managers

I think this is the fundamental fallacy in this whole situation. "Taliban" and "Afghans" are not two separate groups.

Re: Economic costs of war

#332

Post by miked85 »

redandblack wrote: post #179
NonContro wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of cutting costs, the way we exited Afghanistan is the best way to do it. Pull out overnight, abandon all the equipment, and the rapid takeover by the Taliban means we don't need to keep running bombing missions to support a slowly retreating national army. In that regard I'd see the current situation as a success, not a failure. It also seems like the Taliban have chilled out a bit, since we're not seeing w…

in that sense Biden's legacy is cleaning up the mess and not leaving it to the future president

The vast majority of Americans wanted out of Afghanistan. That isn't the issue. The issue is with the way it was done.

Re: Economic costs of war

#333

Post by ericmay »

smegger001 wrote: post #291
ericmay wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Riiiight. With all those ports, infrastructure, and nice easy mountain terrain to navigate. And let’s say China does somehow befriend the Taliban and build all this infrastructure, and import hundreds of thousands of workers that somehow the Taliban doesn’t decide are yet another empire to kick out. What do you think they do with these resources? They make iPhones. That westerners buy. And again, even if they do some…

why bring in hundreds of thousands of workers when China can pay the Taliban to force the Afgans to do it and just send some engineers and managers

Wow jeez when you put it that simply of course they’ll just pay local warlords who totally won’t steal money for fake employees, and they’ll totally have these Afghan people who are hard working and really eager for that 9-5 lifestyle to get out of their own village to “mine” for Chinese engineers and managers.

I hate to be flippant here but this really shows a continued western misunderstanding of how people in places like Afghanistan live.

And even if they did all of that, what good is it exactly? Is China out of resources in China and now will build mountain passes and teach Afghanis how to drive trucks and all of that to mine resources? Sure sounds like nation building to me.

And why would the Taliban agree to this anyway? They could just do the mining themselves.

Re: Economic costs of war

#334

Post by wonwars »

What (and when) were the last three wars where America "won" , meaning fulfill honest objectives in spirit.

E.g. Iraq-2003 doesn't count because (1) , objecties weren't honest, you cannot destroy wmd's that didn't exist and (2) the spirit was acclaimed to be elimination of terrorism and it's well known that not only has the situation deteriorated, America funded al Qaeda in that region.

Re: Economic costs of war

#335

Post by guskel »

Grakel wrote: post #16
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignore money. Think in terms of stuff. Metal that gets put into Humvees can't be put into something else. We threw away an insane amount of stuff. And think in terms of people. People that spend a year as soldiers in Afghanistan can't spend that year doing something else. We threw an insane amount of people-time, and a tragically insane amount of people. There is an opportunity cost in terms of both stuff and people.…

Absolutely not. Waste fuels the economy. There's no shortage of metal, only the price of metal. As for people, spending a couple of years in the military is much better personal development for many young people than going to college at an age when most people can't appreciate it. These things aside, of course the loss of life is horrific and a terrible waste.

What you're positing here is basically the "Broken Window" fallacy.

Re: Economic costs of war

#336

Post by hellbannedguy »

jdavis703 wrote: post #251
Mizza wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this a lot but don't understand why. China has every motivation to prop up the Taliban. A sister comment already noted the mineral resources, but don't forget the main function of Afghanistan as a nation: production of heroin. Narcopolitics are so fantastically more significant than ever gets any attention from "surface" media, but this is the name of the game. Chinese fentanyl has taken over the global opiate…

The Taliban taxes opium farming and manufacturing. It’s believed to be a significant source of revenue for them. But, China probably still has the upper hand in the opiate business here, because fentanyl is far easier to smuggle.

I just heard the Taliban is tithing at 10% a year.

In bad years, they don't expect any taxes.

(It does look like the Taliban has lightened up a bit, but time will tell. Every news station is bashing every aspect of the Taliban.)

Re: Economic costs of war

#337

Post by supperburg »

jobigoud wrote: post #221
supperburg wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a source for COVID deaths? Is there a source that gives the number of deaths that were caused by COVID and nothing else? They say that anyone who died and tested positive for the presence of COVID was considered a COVID death even if they got hit by a bus for example. And many elderly people died from it who were on the brink of death and were just as likely to die from some other minor insult. I wond…

If anything it's underestimated, this can be seen by comparing the number to excess mortality.

Mortality doesn’t seem to have spiked. It’s just continued the trend upward that started in 2009. Looking at a chart of mortality, I don’t see anything.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN?location...

Re: Economic costs of war

#338

Post by wonwars »

new_realist wrote: post #279

Total U.S. assets amount to about $225 trillion. Spending 1/700th of that per year for the past 20 years to protect those assets seems a reasonable investment.

While in principle you're right, I hope you realise that the Iraq work was fake and Obama chose to not pull out of Afghanistan even when laden was dead

Re: Economic costs of war

#339

Post by mkhpalm »

ericmay wrote: post #230
throwawaysea wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is likely to gain trillions from their belt and road initiative expanding into Afghanistan and from getting involved with the mining of the $3T in mineral resources identified previously in Afghanistan. China has already recognized the new Taliban government and the Taliban previously welcomed a new relationship with China that would protect Chinese interests, as they put it. China literally met with the incomi…

Riiiight. With all those ports, infrastructure, and nice easy mountain terrain to navigate. And let’s say China does somehow befriend the Taliban and build all this infrastructure, and import hundreds of thousands of workers that somehow the Taliban doesn’t decide are yet another empire to kick out. What do you think they do with these resources? They make iPhones. That westerners buy. And again, even if they do some…

I think the plan so far is to use it as a land corridor between China Pakistan and/or Iran.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/21/china-taliban-afghanist...

Re: Economic costs of war

#340

Post by dragonwriter »

mc32 wrote: post #243
el_jay wrote: post #118

To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment. But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a thef…

Ever since we reneged on the decision Kennedy made to pull out of VietNam by Johnson, we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government" This thinking has undermined our actions in every major war since then, with the exception of GWI. Gulf War…

> Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out.

No, we didn't, we were perpetually militarily engaged in Iraq, at a lower level, between the 1991 war and the 2003 war.

We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either.

> Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars

Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization.

Post reply on HN