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Economic costs of war

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Re: Economic costs of war

#601

Post by stevenhuang »

Grakel wrote: post #569
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

What I originally said was there's no metal shortage, only the price of metal. We'll be mining the solar system long before we run out of metal on earth. For aluminum, for instance, there's an insane amount in the Earth's crust.

Supply and demand informs price. Not the other way around. That's why your argument makes no sense.

Re: Economic costs of war

#602

Post by fomine3 »

xyzzyz wrote: post #524
mc32 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cultural aspect is critical and people have overlooked in many places. The Optimism for Russia after the fall of the USSR, Ukraine and Afghanistan, Libya, etc. Places with no democratic foundation or tradition but plagued by corruption. It needs to grow over decades organically for the people to get used to the idea and the institutions, for example, like in Hong-Kong. Singapore is another example and they yet do…

> USSR, Ukraine Many former USSR countries are doing quite well with their new democracies. Consider, for example, that Ukraine had basically as much democratic tradition as Poland had (big parts of it literally being parts of Commonwealth of Poland for centuries), and yet Poland’s democracy has been doing much better. I agree that culture and traditions matter, but with your examples, you are overstating your case.

What about Hungary?

Re: Economic costs of war

#603

Post by tuatoru »

queuebert wrote: post #348
secondaryacct wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also they dont humiliate you day and night calling your culture backward, a bonus when you want people to work with you.

Not well read on Chinese history are you?

It might be better put as "the Han Chinese think everyone else is a barbarian savage, but also, they prefer to leave their vassal states to run their internal affairs themselves. They don't call them barbarian savages on a daily basis."

Re: Economic costs of war

#604

Post by ramblenode »

542354234235 wrote: post #586
giardini wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...they've just won." (that is, the Taliban have won) Consider: - the Taliban that G.W. Bush knew are gone. Most of them have died, - OBL and most of his partners are dead, - almost anyone who helped OBL and is still alive remains a target and lives in fear for their life, IOW who "won" might be considered to depend on what we mean by the word "Taliban". The Taliban today is not the Taliban of yesteryear. If there i…

> IOW who "won" might be considered to depend on what we mean by the word "Taliban". Well it certainly wouldn’t include UBL or anyone in Al Qaeda, since they are two totally different groups with totally different goals. We could have gone in 20 years ago with the goal of destroying Al Qaeda and their ability to organize terror attacks. We chose to also overthrow the Taliban “government” and install a new government…

To add to your comment, George Bush's neoconservative faction has been defeated: they are nowhere within the Trump era Republican party. The Democrats have likewise distanced themselves from that era. But the Taliban lives on, having outlasted the shifting political winds in the US.

Re: Economic costs of war

#605

Post by robomartin »

sdenton4 wrote: post #600
robomartin wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost isn't the issue. It's physics. The paper isn't about economics, it's about the physics, the science. And what they found is that claiming that renewables will do anything at all for atmospheric CO2 concentration is, well, as false a statement as anyone can make. The study including looking at deploying solar and wind world-wide with the most advanced versions of these technologies. They determined that not only…

Well, first, I read a very different conclusion from the paper... They say, for example: "That realization prompted us to reconsider the economics of energy. What’s needed, we concluded, are reliable zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over soon—say, within the next 40 years." In other words, it's absolutely an…

That is not the conclusion.

They set out to prove that renewables was the way. They discovered they were wrong. That is a paradigm-shattering conclusion. To this day we hear incessant talk about renewables "saving the planet". This is nonsense.

The only problem I have with the paper is that they did not follow this conclusion with a real study of the plausibility of any solution on a human time scale. They say things like having to capture carbon and have better power plants in 40 years. None of it is correlated to actual realizable effects at scale.

> Your last 'graf sounds like unmitigated tinfoilhat-ism

That isn't MY graphic! That's from the 800,000 ice core atmospheric sample data. Here:

https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html

It's the first link in the "Graphics" section.

If you are going to all this tin-foil it means negating all science on the subject. This data is incredibly accurate and reliable. One of my first questions when finding this data set was the simplest of inquiries: Can ice core atmospheric data from 800,000 years ago be accurate? Well, it turns out, yes, it is. I found and read papers on the subject. It's fascinating technology actually.

The statement I made was that solar and wind --renewables-- can't help us and are pretty much an empty pursuit as it pertains to "saving the planet". These researchers went into it CONVINCED renewables was the way and conducted this research to, as they said, once and for all show the world. What they discovered is they were as wrong as one could be. Renewables are a waste of time, money and resources. They are good and very much justified for other reasons, just not anything related to climate change or atmospheric CO2 concentration.

As I said, I have a 13 kW solar array, soon to grow to 20 kW. I am under no delusion about what it is for. It serves no purpose whatsoever as it pertains to climate change. This is particularly true if you consider the entire installation, which includes a large ground-mounted structure, concrete footings, etc. I sometimes wonder how much carbon was produced to go from minerals on the ground to a structure on my property with a theoretical 13 kW peak generation capacity. Different subject.

Re: Economic costs of war

#606

Post by poorjohnmacafee »

robomartin wrote: post #566
poorjohnmacafee wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

> Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem. While I appreciate your perspective, the hard and cold reality of the situation is that it is illusory to think we can affect something of this magnitude. Not only is it a planetary scale problem, it is also something that, just from the standpoint of conservation of energy, is impossible for…

I don't disagree with you and strongly agree we're having the wrong conversations. But in the spirit of thinking... 2 questions for you...

What is impossible about direct temperature manipulation schemes? I'm referring to proposals like building reflectors to directly lower the earth's temperature. There's nothing in principle preventing this from directly cooling the planet.

Also, what do you know about the physics of CO2 absorption/re-emission? CO2 absorbs what exactly? To start it's the 15 micron band. It is infrared radiation on the longer, weaker side of IR. How much heat does 15 microns contribute to, and what types of molecules [eg ice or water, or only atmosphere?] can actually interact with 15 microns vs. being transparent to it? Since water vapor already absorbs at 15 microns, how does that modulate the effect of CO2? Does CO2 even re-emit 15 microns back to earth, or does it just cause co2 to wiggle a little bit (it definitely causes it to wiggle, but what frequency does it re-emit, if any?) Quantifying heat caused by 15 microns is not something you will find information on, even though the entire carbon based global warming arguments depend entirely on it. But there is another relevant point to be made:

15 micron is in the terahertz spectrum specifically. This spectrum is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to build any sort of transmitter or receiver for, mainly because the air/water vapor simply absorb it in a short distance. To this effect I've heard one college physics professor who publishes his lectures on youtube argue that 15 microns is 99.9% already absorbed in the atmosphere by such effects [1] [eg adding more CO2 will make effectively no difference at all; it's all absorbed already]. We do know the main atmospheric window where energy can reflect back into space does not include the 15 microns band [e.g. CO2's absorption profile doesn't fall in the main atmospheric window]. My question for you is how much time have you spent thinking about absorption/EM spectrum based arguments that get at the actual mechanism of how carbon based global warming is supposed to work? Most people have not. I don't have all the answers, but the physics actually seems to imply it's possible if not likely we could be completely wrong in our assumptions about CO2 and global warming. I would challenge you to come up with a rebuttal to that, in the same way folks have not come up with a rebuttal to the argument you posted. So yes, we're having the wrong conversations.

As an alternate potential explanation consistent with the physics, CFCs do absorb in the atmospheric window, and even though they were banned decades ago it turns out they are on the rise again [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57pU2F-bIQs

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1193-4

Re: Economic costs of war

#607

Post by jrsj »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #396
jrsj wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I think the argument the administration made is a retcon and they made decisions based on bad intelligence that the government would hold up long enough to get everyone and everything out. This idea that their government made a bad suggestion and we listened is silly — they were essentially a puppet state so it’s on us either way.

Re: Economic costs of war

#608

Post by uCantCauseUCant »

edot wrote: post #427
baybal2 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Narcopolitics are so fantastically more significant than ever gets any attention from "surface" media Indeed! The speculation is that there are people very high up in Chinese system who are cashing up on industrial scale fentanyl production. Syrian Assad family now makes more money on captagon than they were doing before the war from all their businesses. Putin Vladimir, the Russian president, made his early fortun…

Any book recommendations on this topic? Particularly the last point - always crazy to learn how the rich of today made their fortunes from now-illegal means (drug trafficking, slavery, arms dealing, etc.).

This british crimes are used as a justification in chinas drug production today. Cause if you export to the ex-colonizers, than is retribution, justified and okay.

Re: Economic costs of war

#609

Post by [deleted] »

Gravey wrote: post #7
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.…

> 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. Much of that stuff has actually found itself in the hands of those it was made to fight against. This is significantly worse than throwing it away in my opinion.

[deleted]

Re: Economic costs of war

#610

Post by Sharlin »

Grakel wrote: post #29
Gravey wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Much of that stuff has actually found itself in the hands of those it was made to fight against. This is significantly worse than throwing it away in my opinion.

But much of the money went to American businesses and jobs. The stuff itself can easily be replaced.

You might want to familiarize yourself with the broken window fallacy.
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