Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big part of this is that apparently, any president can unilaterally decide to go to war and spend $1B per day destroying things, but building infrastructure for Americans requires the agreement of 60 US Senators. Pre-emptive strikes are “national security”, but ensuring nutritional food for children in schools, safe bridges and potable water, and healthcare are not “national security”. Look what Biden had to do to…
US states are free to build infrastructure without any federal involvement or permission. California just spent $114M to build a wildlife crossing bridge over Highway 101. https://smmc.ca.gov/liberty-canyon-wildlife-corridor/
Nowhere is safe
261–270 of 329 posts
Re: Nowhere is safe
#262Earlier 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…
Nations used to fight for extracting tax, and with it free labor, from each other, and that situation was pervasive, and the cause of many wars, before WW2. In fact WW2 is the last such war.
Before WW2, France and England extracted (a LOT of) tax, without doing anything, from Germany. That's how the wealthy in France and England got richer, you know, without producing anything.
Before WW1, the Ottoman empire (the "islamic world" as people like to refer it now) extracted wealth, by capturing slaves and forcing them, at gunpoint (well "at knifepoint", and by simply letting them starve chained up in ditches until they worked), from essentially all of Africa. By the end of the slave trade, Europe participated. Again, let's not pretend that either the caliphs or sultans or royal houses used what was effectively unlimited free labor to end poverty. In fact they made it a lot worse, everywhere, from England to "the islamic world" to India.
You can go back thousands and thousands of years and compare the many situations (e.g. people would not tax foreign nations directly but tax things they needed, sometimes as dramatically as water, but lots of things, including access to international trade), but it goes back very, very, very far. The story of the Minotaur (slaves, militarily extracted from foreign nations would be thrown to a beast if they didn't work). The Exodus story. The Vedas. Right up to the story of Epic of Gilgamesj.
The comment you're replying to is a scream that this situation must be restarted. The US does wealth extraction, and, read the comment, their point is not that they want wealth extraction to stop. No. They want to ... uh ... participate in it.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily If the US has such a strong military why are they always begging European countries to help them with their various totally-not-a-war "actions", like most recently in Iran? Last time the UK got into something in the Middle East with the US we lost more people to "friendly fire"…
Because the US doesn't want sole responsibility or complicity for the wars it starts. It looks a lot better if everyone is involved. And besides, even if you have a large, capable military, why not spread the cost (in lives and materiel) around?
Re: Nowhere is safe
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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An accord reached between Iran and several world powers, including the United States, in July 2015. Not Just Obama. Can the world be saved from central north American partisan squabbling please.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they're exactly right: drones need cheap, powerful parts which have only become possible due to highly concentrated mass production in places like China. You aren't fabbing up integrated machine learning SOCs in a shed in Ukraine, and the cheapness of the parts depends on large unfettered supply chains. They're not "with some skill, you can build a lathe and then machine a pipe gun" simple. In a direct conflict, n…
> You aren't fabbing up integrated machine learning SOCs All the basic sensors you need for flight exist in the literal billions of Android phones produced in the last 15 years. I'm trying to be evasive about how you'd build such a thing because I don't want a visit over a comment online, but if you understand aerodynamics you can make almost anything fly. I think the disconnect here is people reading "drone" and thi…
Even something like a ball bearing is super high tech and precise. Any kind of modern (post WWI) technology is super high tech and precise. Giant efforts were made to destroy ball bearing manufacturing in WWII, not to mention the rest of the war machine. Including German drones.
In a total war scenario, all enemy war factories and infrastructure will be attacked, and even civilian residential areas providing workers to the enemy war effort. This is how the allies mainly fought WWII against Germany.
When you start assembling drones from spare parts from other machines, and making custom drones, then you are at small scale and drones aren't anymore the cheap, mass produced weapon.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Unilateraly on the level of countries. The other signatories (China, France, Russia, the U.K., Germany and the EU) believed that the deal was good and Iran was holding up their end of the bargain at that time. If the USA government had credible evidence that it is not so, they could have picked up the phone and presented their case to the other signatories. Or at least to their allies. Then once those countries were…
Re: Nowhere is safe
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
An accord reached between Iran and several world powers, including the United States, in July 2015. Not Just Obama. Can the world be saved from central north American partisan squabbling please.
It would be truer to say the agreement was between several world powers and Obama, as the Senate didn't ratify.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, if mainland China is successfully invaded by a country being supplied with American military equipment and having their fixed infrastructure destroyed - like described in the article - you can be dead sure that they will try to destroy American military plants. None of the super power countries will ever accept defeat in their homeland and being conquered without using all means possible to hinder it. That's why…
That's borderline nonsense scenario. Superpowers aren't going to be existentially invaded via lesser proxy. We're talking about being quagmired in war of choice where proxys being supplied. Lots of escalation rungs up the ladder that run before looping into superpower vs superpower peer conflict.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#269Hmm... Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free. The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people. Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peac…
I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible. Unless we've managed to find ourselves alive at the point in all of history where humanity forever abandoned war all together, there will be another war at some point. That doesn't mean it needs to happen today or that fighting to sustain peace isn't an admirable, and necessary, action to tak…
There is no post-WWII goal of permanent peace. It’s a side effect of the invention of nuclear weapons, which made wars amongst powerful countries a lose-lose scenario for everyone.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#270We have the prospect of AI destroying humanity and living life underground. It's more like The Matrix every day.