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Nowhere is safe
221–230 of 329 posts
Re: Nowhere is safe
#222This is the classic tech person trying to sound smart in a domain outside of their expertise. Fixed civilian infrastructure has never been safe. The way you protect it is diplomatically, by having that region not be attacked in the first place or putting incentives such that certain bits of infrastructure are considered off limits. Secondly, people whose only experience of war comes from fictional media have a drasti…
Your analysis presumes air power alone. Assets are seized by cavalry (in modernity, APCs and tanks) and held by infantry. Nothing new under the sun.
The only reason anybody is thinking of destroying civilian infrastructure (wealth) is because everybody took off the table the prospect of sending in cavalry and infantry to seize and hold it.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#223That's totally not the case. Asymmetry is that when the adversary starts doing it, US is politically and socially not allowed to reply in kind. For instance: ensuring they have no electricity makes it impossible to continue producing drones - knock out every power plant and grid transformer and conduct surveillance using IR cameras to find everything that resembles thermal power plant cooling, and knock it out as well - without electricity, industry can't work.
Drones work for Ukraine and Russia because neither side has a viable air force. If any of them had, they'd win without the need for drones. They work for US because political constraints prevents US from making appropriate use of air force.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world. Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world. Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immen…
Given the immense capabilities of the United States government, I don't think there is going to be a war inside the US. Or at least not one that lasts any amount of time.
This isn't really a given. Historically, whenever you have a civil war the existing state's military splits down the middle, with people generally unwilling to fire on friends, family, and neighbors. Former military officers usually form the core of the rebel military, taking their training, experience, and oftentimes equipment with them to fight for the other side.
The mistake here is thinking of the U.S. government as a monolith. Ultimately it's all just people, bound together by being paid for in dollars that are either raised as taxes or borrowed as treasuries. GP's post posits a world where the dollar is worthless; what's binding them together then?
Re: Nowhere is safe
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world. Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world. Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immen…
How does the "petrodollar" exactly prop up the US dollar? The price of a barrel of oil has oscillated quite a bit in dollar terms, so it's not like there's anything like a fixed or artificially-maintained 'exchange rate' there. There's, what, a 10x swing between highest and lowest USD price of oil in the last 10 years alone? The dollar has fluctuated vs other currencies too. I've never fully followed how trading for…
Not an economist but the petrodollar concept helps the dollar because everybody that needs oil needs to buy dollars. You see it as small thing but it is fundamental thing because oil is used in so many places that as we have seen a disruption of 20% of it would start causing real problems on almost the entire world.
QED: oil powerful, only dollar buy oil, dollar stronger.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#226We have the prospect of AI destroying humanity and living life underground. It's more like The Matrix every day.
I maintain the position that people will chose to go into the matrix
Re: Nowhere is safe
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the "petrodollar" exactly prop up the US dollar? The price of a barrel of oil has oscillated quite a bit in dollar terms, so it's not like there's anything like a fixed or artificially-maintained 'exchange rate' there. There's, what, a 10x swing between highest and lowest USD price of oil in the last 10 years alone? The dollar has fluctuated vs other currencies too. I've never fully followed how trading for…
Not an economist but the petrodollar concept helps the dollar because everybody that needs oil needs to buy dollars. You see it as small thing but it is fundamental thing because oil is used in so many places that as we have seen a disruption of 20% of it would start causing real problems on almost the entire world. QED: oil powerful, only dollar buy oil, dollar stronger.
The use of dollars to purchase any commodity is a negligible fraction of demand for dollars.
What you should be looking at is investment demand for dollars, that is, in which currency does the seller store their surplus.
Think about it:
I need to buy a barrel of oil, but I am in Argentina. So I sell my pesos for dollars, I buy the oil with the dollar. The seller now has dollars, and sells the dollars for Swiss Francs and invests the money in swiss bonds.
Now, what happened? The global demand for dollars by the buyer was exactly offset by the seller. It is the seller that decides, by choosing where to store his surplus, of what currency is boosted by oil. And it is not the currency that oil is sold for, it is the currency that the proceeds are invested in.
So oil is completely irrelevant for the value of the dollar, what is relevant is that investors want to store their funds in the US capital markets. That's what matters, and it is investor preference to store their earnings in capital markets that determines why they want to denominate oil in dollars. It just saves on an extra transaction.
But focusing on the transactions misses the picture of the dollar's strength, because denominating oil in dollars is merely a consequence of the desirability of US capital markets as a destination for foreign capital. And that desirability drives everything else. It's not oil, it's deep, liquid capital markets with established foreign investor rights. That trumps everything else.
Think about it -- would you keep your earnings in a country with weak foreign investor rights or lack of financial transparency or illiquid markets where you couldn't easily pull your money out when you wanted to? That is much more important to the seller of the oil than anything else. It will drive what oil is priced in. And it will drive the demand for dollars.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#228That's totally not the case. Asymmetry is that when the adversary starts doing it, US is politically and socially not allowed to reply in kind. For instance: ensuring they have no electricity makes it impossible to continue producing drones - knock out every power plant and grid transformer and conduct surveillance using IR cameras to find everything that resembles thermal power plant cooling, and knock it out as wel…
> ensuring they have no electricity makes it impossible to continue producing drones
> political constraints prevents US from making appropriate use of air force
Are you arguing that destroying a country of 90M's entire basic infrastructure is an "appropriate" use of force?
Re: Nowhere is safe
#229[flagged]
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Re: Nowhere is safe
#230That was an interesting article, but this comment is what made me sit up:
The B-1 is only stationed at 2 bases with public access