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Economic costs of war

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Re: Economic costs of war

#391

Post by 908B64B197 »

pizzapill wrote: post #360
Smoosh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of this when people say we can't afford to mitigate climate change.

China and the USA are responsible for roughly half of global Green House Gas emissions. A few years ago China pledged to invest trillions into environmental protection over the next decades. We can only hope that the USA takes similar steps. Both countries can afford it and both have access to know how other countries have build up in this effort.

When you look at who's polluting and who's emissions are on an upward trajectory, there's one obvious country that's actively working against the environment. China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has:

- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)

- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)

Meanwhile for the same period China has had

- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)

- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007

So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

Re: Economic costs of war

#392

Post by duxup »

I remember when Bush Jr's big campaign promise was "no nation building".

And then we got ultra nation building.

Maybe he should have listened to himself?

Re: Economic costs of war

#393

Post by 908B64B197 »

boplicity wrote: post #330
jonnycomputer wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But neither has there been a lot of resistance; most places surrendered without a fight, from what I can tell. That suggests that the Taliban, for good or ill, have more legitimacy in the eyes of Afghanis, than the government we created and supported for the last 20 years. But, Afghanistan has changed, and who really knows what is going to happen. Cell phones are ubiquitous. They hardly existed in 2001. A whole gener…

> That suggests that the Taliban, for good or ill, have more legitimacy in the eyes of Afghanis, No, I would say that the Afghanis were literally told that they were going to eventually lose the war and that the Taliban would eventually win. The people put in the position to fight the Taliban made the sensible choice to lose peacefully, as opposed to risking their lives for a lost cause.

> the sensible choice to lose peacefully, as opposed to risking their lives for a lost cause.

I wonder how long they cashed their checks, knowing full well they were going to surrender immediately as soon as the US was going to pull out. Or better, despite not ever having the intention of fighting (or even agreeing with the Taliban), claiming persecution to hustle a western visa/passport when they would inevitably lose.

Re: Economic costs of war

#394

Post by asdff »

markus_zhang wrote: post #276
heresie-dabord wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A nation has to work out its own problems for itself. This point being raised, it is time for the US to spend money on education to support its own democracy.

Nowadays it's already difficult if not impossible. In the age of big data and open manipulation, there is zero incentive for the politicians, corporations and media to promote independent thought for ordinary people, or to put more precisely only independent thoughts that benefit their agendas. The same goes to millions of middle class employees of those entities. They might want to teach independent thoughts to thei…

The good news is there are more independent thoughts these days. 70 years ago it was hard having independent thoughts when it was three channels on TV and two newspapers and everyone listened to the same couple of popular artists. Back then, if you were too independent you would get beat up after class or worse.

Re: Economic costs of war

#395

Post by sgregnt »

azurezyq wrote: post #310
sgregnt wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how this relates to what I wrote? Apparently USA voters do think the spending is adequate... or do you have a better way to decide on this? On a tangential: We can also try to compare the cost of 1 mile of subway in NY vs 1 mile in Shanghai. I didn't check but I would assume NY cost would be more than double. Services in US cost a lot. US innovates and a lot of other countries copy... while it seems that Chi…

I don't think 1/3 is "not far behind". https://www.statista.com/chart/16878/military-expenditure-by... Actually you don't need US's level of spending if you are not "actively" into wars like ones in the middle east.

"Actually you don't need US's level of spending if you are not "actively" into wars like ones in the middle east."

That's your believe but sorry, I don't want to take this claim on the face value. Maybe you're right, maybe not, I believe that's a complicated issue for sure...

One could claim you would need to spend much more were you not involved in these conflicts... each war has it's own reason and own goals and the decision to enter a war is weighted in geopolitically economically etc..and then the elected president makes this decision. Now, what I do have an evidence for, is that politically, the votes are probably split since there is pretty much status quo on that for many years and many administrations...

Re: Economic costs of war

#396

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

jrsj wrote: post #374
swader999 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably should have got the civilians out before the military but what do I know...

Allegedly the “government” of Afghanistan (its really just been a sham and a U.S. puppet state for the last 20 years) didn’t want this to happen because they wanted to avoid demoralizing the Afghan army which…subsequently refused to fight anyways. Or at least that’s how I understood some of what Biden said earlier today. For all we know that was the idea of our own military or intelligence community & now we are conv…

Dunno about that. Establishment, such as it is in the form of various talking heads, appears to be somewhat angry. I am not sure it is all a show.

Re: Economic costs of war

#397

Post by AnimalMuppet »

stevenhuang wrote: post #232
Grakel wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no shortage of metal, that's the point. Open your mind.

There is an effective shortage of resources since the capacity to mine for them is not infinite, and production cannot meet demands.

And the metal in space doesn't help us with our current technology. Obviously.

"We can't have a metal shortage because there's lots of metal in space" is not the most coherent argument I've heard today...

Re: Economic costs of war

#398

Post by datavirtue »

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…

Who says they are heading toward democracy at all? Do you stop at fascism along the way? Afghanistan was essentially our state. It was beginning to prosper and experience the rights and freedoms already established by our presence--why do "they" need to create a government if we already have one that works and that their people seemed to like?

We should open up to voluntarily annexing states like Afghanistan and Puerto Rico instead of continuing to drool over some fuedal age government philosophy. Invite people in. The current system of fight-and-flight is looking a bit dated.

Re: Economic costs of war

#399

Post by poorjohnmacafee »

robomartin wrote: post #209
Smoosh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of this when people say we can't afford to mitigate climate change.

It isn't that we can't afford to mitigate climate change. We cannot mitigate climate change, period. In other words, you could throw all the money on the planet at it and it would not make a dent. No purported solution passes the math and physics tests. It's easy to make a mess. This can be done with very little energy, resources and time. On the other hand, cleaning-up the mess takes far more energy, time and resour…

Especially true given water vapor is a more potent ghg increasing with each upward temperature tick, in a way that's not linearly reversible from linear co2 reduction.

Probably the only way that could potentially fix things is direct temperature manipulation schemes. There's a lot of them that have been proposed.

Worth noting that the major economies in Asia aren't doing much of anything tangible for co2 reduction. The EU has basically the world's smallest petroleum industry so it's no sacrifice for them to push climate change measures. The US will effectively be transferring huge amounts of its economic wealth to other petroleum countries who don't care. Ugly all around.

Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem.

Re: Economic costs of war

#400

Post by sgregnt »

gruez wrote: post #286
sgregnt wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There might be an escape velocity to this: as technology evolves it is easier to clean pollution, and perhaps the innovation moves faster than the added pollution. So maybe the best time to start cleaning is 30 years into the future?

>There might be an escape velocity to this There's a better term for this rather than "escape velocity", because a similar problem exists for interstellar travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...

Thank you for sharing!
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