BahRamYou
16hr ago
My understanding is that there are three sides to this. The first is that minesweeping is just inherently difficult, for anyone. Even clearing a single mine is difficult, and this becomes vastly more difficult when there's large numbers of them. The second is that the USN in particular has problems with this, as all their attempts to build a dedicated mineclearing ship get cancelled. Maybe it's just not glamorous enough to draw funding? But the third is that the USN doesn't particularly need to be good at this. "Shoot the archer, not the arrow" is the key philosophy. Its a whole lot easier to sink a mine laying boat than to hunt all its individual mines. Thats what we've done to Iran so far. And we have the luxury of operating abroad. If anything, adversaries like China should be afraid the USN would mine its ports, which would completely crash its economy with minimal effort.
BahRamYou
18hr ago
Well, I guess we'll find out. But the IRGC seems to be more of a regular army, and one with pretty bad morale and organization. Hamas seems like a group of fanatics who spent years digging tunnels- hard to actually "defeat" that without killing all of them, but the IRGC might just surrender at some point.
BahRamYou
20hr ago
BahRamYou
21hr ago
From where I sit, the situation is exactly the opposite. The first week of the war was spent going high priority targets (missile launchers, SAM batteries, military leadership, etc) with expensive long-range missiles. They also had to focus a lot of attention on shooting down Iranian counterstrikes. But at this point, their air defense is gone, and their missile attacks are down 92%. The US and Israel are now free to focus on low cost, relatively low-intensity bombing, using cheap drones and JDAM bombs. This is where they'll start to focus on targets like the lower-level IRGC commanders and barracks. The IRGC might be "well trained" at massacring protesters, but it's pretty useless at defending itself from this kind of bombardment, and once all they're military is destroyed they'll be in no shape to handle mass protests or Kurdish insurgents. Their nuclear program and everyone who ever worked on it will be killed, probably by Israel if the US for some reason doesn't do it.
Iran's last hope was shutting down oil through the straight of Hormuz. They've done that so far my making it too risky to be worth the trip, but not actually mining it or making it impossible. Oil prices have risen, but not to crazy levels- oil futures still seem to be assessing that the flow will resume before too long. Saudi Arabia can build new pipelines to avoid the straight of Hormuz, while other countries like the US, Canada, and Venezuela can ramp up production. The only country that really needs to export oil through the Persian gulf is Iran.
What it shows, mostly, is that Trump is not an isolationist- he's perfectly willing to go to war overseas if he thinks its necessary. That should be good news for the people of Taiwan, although perhaps bad news if that means the increased risk of WW3. I think it will pressure Congress to approve a large increase in military funding to increase stocks of the high-end missiles that were depleted in this conflict.
BahRamYou
22hr ago
Looking back, the periods in my life when I had the most friends are when we needed each other:
- as kids, stuck in this big crazy public school with a bunch of strangers, trying to survive
- as college students, living on our own for the first time
- on a summer abroad, living in a foreign country for the first time
- starting my first corporate job, trying to find other new hire to learn together with
But more and more we're all just... self sufficient. We work remotely, we learn from youtube tutorials or AI, and can hire specialists for almost any task that needs doing. There's none of those friction points that force us to be around random people, and when we do, everyone is just staring at their phone. There's also a feedback loop where, the less time you spend around other people, the more your social skills decline, and the harder it becomes to do friendly conversation or invite people to social events.
BahRamYou
1d ago
Yeah that's basically what I've come to think about it. This NYT article about its history. Basically, it was a muddy, disgusting mess, that mostly became famous because of a very carefully edited movie about it that came out a year later. The iconic Jimmy Hendrix performance was actually the last act, a day after it was supposed to end, and most of the crowd had already left. They had no no bathrooms, limited water, lots of rain, and 800 drug overdoses.
Was it less violent than the 99 version? .. maybe? The music at least was less angry. And there's less evidence of violence. But my suspicion is that there was actually a ton of sexual assault at the original event, it just didn't get recorded because there were a lot fewer cameras back then and everyone was high. Those 60s hippies were nasty, and there's lots of other disturbing accounts of their bad behavior.
BahRamYou
1d ago
The power to devastate is a great power in some ways, and quite weak in other ways. The Taliban is back in charge in Afghanistan.
Well, as long as the Taliban minds their own business and no longer harbors massive training camps for terrorists, I suppose they can handle Afghanistan as well as anyone.
Also, a big part of why they were able to return to power was that their leaders set up a safe governmemt in Pakistan. ...Perhaps the time has come to do something about that Pakistan situation? They're almost as bad as Iran in terms of "countries that shouldn't be allowed to have nukes." It would be a good demonstration for the world, that just having a few crappy nukes doesn't suddenly render your country invincible. With some forward bases in Iran on one side, and cooperation from India on the other, we could knock out Pakistan's delivery systems before they have a chance to fire anything.
BahRamYou
1d ago
It mostly comes up when I'm trying to find a place in a city i haven't been before. So I'm skimming through hundreds of reviews accross dozens of different places, and they all seem to be people who have never eaten at a restaurant before so they're just dazzled by the concept of having someone bring food to them in exchange for money.
BahRamYou
2d ago
Anyone else feel like Google maps reviews (and most other online review systems) have become totally worthless the last few years? It seems like every single place has overwhelmingly 5 star reviews, no matter how bad it is. I can't tell if it's bots, paid reviewers, or just a weird culture where people think they're "being nice" by leaving a 5 star review. Either way, i no longer trust them at all.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. Sunken treasure galleons also have some value, although those are usually protected by the local laws of whatever country they sunk nearby. I really think there's some value to be found there. Of course, even just landing a probe on an asteroid is no easy feat. So far the only sample return mission we've done from the main surface of an asteroid just bounced off of it like a pogo stick.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Telling all of his followers to boycott the election or vote Dem because the Republicans are too pro-Israel for his liking. It just seems delusional to me.
BahRamYou
6d ago
I feel like he had a brief chance to become someone really significant, adding his followers to the general Republican coalition. He would never be able to control the Republican party, but they would have listened to him. Instead, he threw it all away for some sort of purity test, like many extremists do. He'll have no influence at all, and it's not even clear what he wants. He reminds me of Jon Stewart- very funny as a comedian, but not much of a serious thinker.
I also think he relied on 4chan /pol/ memes to do a lot of the lifting for him in generating ideas, but 4chan is kinda dead these days, which killed his best source of material.
BahRamYou
7d ago
You appear to treat everything from China with the utmost suspicion as propaganda and everything from the US with the utmost bullishness, based on an unshakeable idea that everything will turn out roses for the US in the end. This is, ironically enough, a very late Qing Dynasty-like attitude. I don't think China's military technology is on par with the US yet, but one thing I will say is that they understand national humiliation intimately and see it as a distinct possibility even now, and you don't. Yet.
I suspect this is perhaps the biggest disagreement between us. Where are you from, out of curiousity? I admit that I'm American, so you might say I'm biased, but I also understand the American culture of openness. The flaws in our system are widely publicised, and criticized, and used as propaganda by political opponents... all the while engineers work quitely behind the scenes to make them better. The result is that they get a lot of negative publicity, but work better than expected when they actually see combat. And they are intended to be used, not just put on display in a parade to deter invasions or stomp repress our own people. The more closed-off countries like Russia, Iran, and to some extent China, do the opposite- they take every opportunity to hype up their latest military hardware, while keeping its problems secret. When it finally gets tested in real war, it always seems to perform worse than what was promised. It's a pattern that we saw again, and again, and again throughout the cold war, and repeated again just this week, as American air power effortlessly dismantled Iranian/Russian air defense systems and shot down their missiles.
Which is to say- when American defense contractors say that, say, all recent tests of GBMD against ICBMs were successful, with an estimated 97% chance to kill when using multiple interceptors, or that Aegis can track missiles of all ranges, including ICBM, and relay that tracking to other systems like THAAD I tend to believe them. If you don't believe them, that's fine, but it does seem like China believes that their only hope is to massively increase their arsenal to overcome missile defense by raw numbers.
I have read about this before, and there's been a lot of work done assessing the feasibility of comprehensive nuclear defence from a cost perspective. Here is an example of such a study, attempting to estimate how much the defender would need to spend relative to the offender to reach an overall system efficiency of 90%. A lot of assumptions are made, but even if you go with a very high individual interceptor kill rate of 90% with perfect decoy discrimination, the asymmetry in cost is staggering. And this analysis even excludes the cost of space and ground-based sensors needed by the defender!
"A hypothetical scenario is analyzed in which the United States has a functioning BMD technology and enough interceptors to distribute them in a two-layer defense with the overall system efficiency of 90%, as targeted by U.S. war planners. It is assumed that the attacker has enough missiles to deliver a range between 500 and 6000 warheads to the continental United States. Results show that in the most optimistic case for the defender, with a very high individual interceptor kill effectiveness of 90% and with perfect decoy discrimination capability, the United States would need to spend on average 8 times more than the attacker, for a total cost between $60 billion and $500 billion. With a more realistic individual interceptor effectiveness of 50% and if the system is unable to discriminate against decoys, the United States would need to spend on average 70 times more, for a total cost between $430 billion and $5.3 trillion."
That's not quite what I was asking- I wanted to know, how much does it cost to produce a nuclear warhead? Is there even a number? I suspect that even China finds it difficult to mass-produce nuclear warheads.
But it doesn't matter. This is an old argument, going back to the 80s and hotly debated during the 2000s. I'm well aware that, until now, the price of nuclear weapons was much lower than the cost of any potential defense. But we will see if that changes. For now, the US can easily afford to spend enough for interceptors to protect against North Korea, and we've already handled the threat of Iran. So the only real threat left is the absolute worst case- an all out nuclear exchange with China and Russia firing literally all of their nukes against the US.
And yes, obviously that's bad. Obviously we must do everything we can to avoid such a terrible scenario.
But look at the numbers being quoted there. Based on the 90% effectiveness that we're currently seeing in tests, the worst case would be $500 billion. It's a large number, but it's not an impossible one. That's about 1/2 of 1 year of US military spending! Even the largest number of $5.3 trillion is roughly the scale of what they plan to spend, all together, on the F35 fighter. The US just has a lot of money to throw around on military hardware.
And again... let's just see how future tech develops which can alter that calculus. The Multiple Kill Vehicle program is, as far as I can tell, still being worked on. The Golden Dome plan is to put interceptors in orbit, destroying ICBMs before they can launch MIRVs, which drastically changes the cost balance. You shouldn't assume that technology will remain forever stuck in the 1980s! (unless, of course, you're Russia, in which case I guess it will...)
What makes you think China is at all interested in playing World Police like the U.S. and USSR?
Well, that was my original point really. The US now stands in a position to dominate the world militarily, and I don't see how China is able to stop that at all. For every single country where they've invested money in business contracts to build soft power, the US can simply topple their government at any time it wishes. I'm not saying it should do this... but it could.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Hmm ok, thanks for looking that up! A lot more than i would have expected in the "jewelry" category. Still a lot in the "bars" or "central banks" categories. So I think there's plenty of room to add to those categories without crashing the price of gold.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Again I'll plead out that this is going off an a tangent of a tanget of a tangent from my original argument- that the US is now a hyperpower in conventional terms, far beyond what it had before. We're now talking about the history of nuclear weapons deterrance during the Cold War. I only ever touched on these subjects for the sake of completeness, and I don't claim to be an expert.
It seems to me you're arguing for a basically binary view of nuclear deterrance, correct? That is, either a nation has enough nukes to deter, or it does not. A mere 300 warheads would deter all of NATO, and any more than that is simply a waste of money. That does seem to be the strategy chosen by China during the Cold War, and I suppose it worked well enough for them, but the US and USSR continued to build more and more warheads- was that just a complete waste in your thinking?
Indeed, China no longer seems to pursue that strategy. Instead, they seem to be rapidly expanding their nuclear arsenal, which seems to indicate that they do not feel safe with just a minimal deterrance- perhaps that was only driven by their 20th century poverty? The only nations that seem to rely on an absolutely minimal nuclear deterrance are the very small, poor nations like North Korea, Pakistan, and China in the 1960s. To me, that sounds like what the kids call "cope" rather than an actual strategy.
But all of this talk of the 20th century is rapidly growing out of date. Back then, we couldn't hope to hit an ICBM in flight at all, or perhaps only by detonating a counter-nuke in our own airspace. The 80s had vague plans of doing space-based missile defense, but this never worked out. Then in the 2000s we had a vague chance to hit with interceptors, but as you said it would take perhaps 1000 interceptors to hit just a few interceptors.
Nowadays? And in the near future? The math seems different. Interceptors are accurate enough that it's approaching 1 per warhead, especially with Multiple Kill Vehicle technology. MIRVs might not be super expensive, but they're not cheap either- I genuinely have no idea whether it's easier to build an interceptor or a nuclear warhead at this point. And if Golden Dome succeeds- and I see no reason why it can't!- then the calculus completely shifts, to where one orbital interceptor can take out an entire ICBM full of warheads before it has time to launch or separate.
But really, all of that is tangentiai to the real question- just how much power does the US have to influence world events with hard power right now? And the answer is, a lot. It can topple basically any government, anywhere, in a matter of weeks. In the 20th century, that would have met massive blowback from the USSR. In the early 21st century, it would have meant an endless slog against insurgents armed by Iran. Now? China seems powerless to do anything. They can't even make good propaganda like the USSR could. They could, at best, defend themselves in an all-out nuclear war like you're talking about. For anything else? The US can do what it wants.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Like all men I've had my share of both romance and rejections. I am currently in a good long-term relationship. So, no, your personal attack on me is false.
My claim was that men are still purposefully going out in real-life spaces with the intention of meeting women, while women are increasingly relying on social media to get interaction from men. That seems both obviously true in my lived experience, and also true in the evidence that you cited. You seemed to make a very strong claim that "men and women are the same" from some random reddit link about "screen time" which isn't the issue at all. Scrolling Instagram vs playing a video game is very different, when one involves getting likes and DMs from the opposite sex and the other is killing NPCs.
But I admit I get a little defensive about this stuff, because I see so many young men getting absolutely gaslit by feminist dating advice. To put this in your words, I do try and steer away from Bulverism, but this really seems like you're just a guy who argues a lot on the internet and has gotten bitter about it, and this is driving your white knighting of women and attacks on young men. Am I wrong?
BahRamYou
8d ago
Literally your own link said that women are using instagram and pinterest more, while men are doing online gaming more. But that all gets rolled into "screen time. " Frankly i thought that was just common sense that doesn't need a source? Its not a remarkable coincidence that women and men are different.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Well.. if there's anything Elon Musk is good at, its making ideas that seem silly turn into reality, right? But I fear this might be beyond even his powers.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Yes, I'm aware of that. I was actually a hardcore liberal back then, who saw a lot of my classmates suffer from long deployments in what seemed a never ending, pointless war.
But as the saying goes... when the facts change, I change my mind. I think the War on Terror bought us a lot of skill in fighting this source of war, and I also think new technology has opened up new options we didn't have before. Just as "not every war is WW2," we shouldn't assume every war is Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan. Sometimes watt really does change
I wonder if any of the hardcore rationalists would invest in this. 0.0000001% chance that this asteroid claim becomes worth a trillion dollars at some vague point in the future.
BahRamYou
8d ago
and even asteroid mining, which is a dubious economic proposition in the first place, doesn't really benefit from humans being in space
I had a silly thought about this. Most gold on Earth doesn't physically change hands, it just sits around in bank vaults being traded electronically. Whose to say we couldn't do the same thing in space? We could send a probe to an asteroid to mine the gold, and then just leave it there, which massively simplifies the mission. It could be traded electronically back to Earth, with some sort of discount but still worth something. You might not even have to mine it at all, simply landing there, assessing it, and staking a claim might be worth something to someone. Of course, this also opens the door to space pirates, going out there to steal the gold... but for now it's more secure than any bank vault.
(I do agree with your larger point that space colonization for humans is impossible right now, unless we see a drastic improvement in tech. The real money is sending data around LEO)
BahRamYou
8d ago
Most of what i would say is in the comments there. There's very different types of socializing and screen time. Women are more likely to socialize in person with a group of already exiating friends (usually all-female) and actively avoid meeting men outside. They're also using sites like instagram and pinterest the most. Men spend their screen time on things like games, twitter, and reddit, which are only barely social, then go out active trying to meet women and get mocked when they fail.
Ironically, "take out China" is actually easier in many ways than "defend Taiwan."
In some ways, defending Taiwan while not destroying mainland China might be the hardest problem. What is the US supposed to do, just build interceptor missiles forever while being forbidden from counterattacks? Screw that.
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