131–140 of 255 posts
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Are you saying that any competent military would consider racking up a civilian death toll on the order of the Auschwitz death camp in the matter of days? Thank god the US military isn't competent then.
Most major militaries have considered options that are orders of magnitude worse.
Again, the concept that "war is hell" doesn't seem to hit home for some people.
Every nation gets the government it deserves.
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They considered an attack that would have killed ~1M people, presumably mainly civilians? sigh smh
They consider everything.
https://www.google.de/search?q=world+targets+in+megadeaths&t...
(read the title on the spine of the book)
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It's not atmospheric pressure: "Here we report an experiment of a siphon operating at sea level at a height of 15 m, well above 10 m. Prior degassing of the water prevented cavitation. This experiment provides conclusive evidence that siphons operate through gravity and molecular cohesion." http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16790
Quote from the conclusion: """Extrapolating these results from even the most conservative experimental measurements of the tension under which cavitation occurs it is possible that the cohesive strength of fully degassed water is able to support a continuous vertical column greater than several hundred meters. While the experiment performed here did not reach anywhere near the absolute limit predicted it does shed li…
You can blame ISIS all you want, but aren't the 1M people who'll be affected by this basically supporters of ISIS? As you said, they're ISIS's own citizens. So basically they're being hoist by their own petard. Every nation gets the government it deserves.
This is a somewhat radical stance. When an armed group seizes the control of a city, the citizens don't always have the ability to fight back.
There are plenty of people who are risking their lives and have lost it in ISIS control territory, telling them they "deserved" it is really rash.
Let's reverse the point of view and let's take 1M of Americans. Do you think I will find 1M Obama supporter?
You have basically the ISIS stance, if you are living in the West, Muslim or not, you are an enemy and thus you deserve to be blown up.
You can blame ISIS all you want, but aren't the 1M people who'll be affected by this basically supporters of ISIS? As you said, they're ISIS's own citizens. So basically they're being hoist by their own petard. Every nation gets the government it deserves.
The answer is - no, they are not basically supporters of ISIS. A few certainly are, but not many. They're people trapped under the tyrannical rule of strongmen who came to power in a vacuum because ... the people did not have the government they deserve.
> The dam was designed by a Swiss firm of consultants and built by a German-Italian consortium in 1984. Water began seeping through in 1986, when it became apparent that the geological issues were worse than the consultants had predicted. I doubt that this was an innocent failure on their part. There was a huge financial incentive for these firms to find some way to validate this project. Successive foreign consultan…
Judging by the Wikipedia entry[0], engineers did warn of it and propose a solution, but it would have slowed construction. > Because the dam was constructed on a foundation of soluble gypsum, the engineers recommended the implementation of a grout curtain within the foundation before the superstructure was built. Instead, to speed construction of the dam, engineers installed a grouting gallery that would allow contin…
So I get that it was not the choice one would use in hindsight, I can also see how people at the time weren't thinking "Well what happens if the government is overthrown and we're in civil war and can't do the grouting?" No, doubt if that came up someone said "Well if that happens we'll have worse problems than keeping this dam fixed! har har har." (as you can tell I really dislike it when people use that as an excuse for allowing technical debt to be created)
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"To understand his tantrum one must understand the kinship he feels with the great men of history, with history itself. Lack of reverence for an image of Copernicus might suggest a lack of reverence for Saddam." From : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/tales-of... Dictators are violent, not stupid. They understand risks, and make decisions like any other leader.
Most dictators tend to behave in ways that doesn't exactly encourage their minions to be open and honest with them - the unhappy outcome of the 1937 Census in the Soviet Union being a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_%281937%29 I think it would have been a foolishly courageous engineer who told Saddam that his dam project wasn't going to work...
That isn't how it works. You don't just walk up to the dictator and troll him/her in the face about their project.
You discuss engineering merits/demerits, risks/advantages make a brief conclusion and leave it there. You leave the decision to the them. Its a totally different thing for them to neglect all of that and continue with their will.
But a good engineer would talk on the project's merit instead of talking about the dictators foolishness on the project.
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If those firms knew if the extreme risks then they should have decided not to accept the work! I think it's pretty much a given that Sadaam Hussein, even back then, was a dictator who wouldn't necessarily put the safety of his people first.
I do not think that because he was a dictator he would not care at all. Probably, he did not want to destroy Mosul and all its people. And even if this did not worry him, taking into account that he was doing this for publicity (either internal or international), he would not have wanted the dam to fail and kill thousands of people.
Bad does not equal stupid.