bail out of NATO
Man. This might be for the best – I directionally support leaving NATO, or at least scaling back our commitments there – but ideally we would give them plenty of notice and time to make their own security adjustments.
Maybe we did and nobody was listening. Or maybe we still will.
ETA to your point – thinking about it, I almost wonder if maybe this is the only way to make it stick, instead of the US just re-joining in 3 years or whatever.
Shrike
7hr ago
Months after he made noises about attacking Europe to steal Greenland.
Didn't he specifically rule out attacking Europe to steal Greenland?
Shrike
8hr ago
I will also just add that while I myself have made the point that a strong (and especially unified) Europe is not in American interests – and I think the US has acted in ways cognizant of this – to be fair to the US, it has consistently asked its NATO allies to step up to the plate and spend more on defense. SecDef Gates was EXTREMELY pointed about this! So it's not like the US is suddenly rug pulling Europe, they've been ignoring increasingly pointed US complaints about the state of their armed forces going back to the Clinton administration.
I think (from the US POV) there's a sweet spot where Europe is strong enough to deter Russia and not strong enough to meaningfully threaten the United States, but it seems like we've somehow instead found ourselves in a weird spot where Europe might not be strong enough to meaningfully threaten Russia and is desperately casting about for ways to deter the United States.
Shrike
8hr ago
I would also just add that I think the idea that the US just now started acting with "realpolitik" is...very ahistorical. Europe accepted us after WW2 because the Russians were ~infinitely worse, not because the US didn't indulge in realpolitik.
For all the griping about Iraq (which...I get it! I also gripe about Iraq!) and American Empire, the specific failures of Iraq were bad in (large) part because it wasn't tempered by realpolitik, not because it was an imperial/hegemonic action. I think a realpolitik view (and also most American presidents throughout all of history) would have just bombed the heck out of various unlucky places known or suspected to be involved in terrorism and bribed, beg, borrowed, stolen and murdered until we got UBL and then called it a day. That might have been bad in different ways but it probably would not have been a 20-year ground occupation.
Shrike
8hr ago
I think a Compact of Free Association could thread the needle nicely, giving Greenland independence while also potentially getting them more US funding than they are getting from Denmark.
Shrike
12hr ago
The funny thing is, that had the US played their cards differently, it is very possible they could have just convinced the Greenlanders they had a better deal, and let them vote to secede as you suggest.
See, part of what is missed in this entire discussion is that the US offering to purchase Greenland from Denmark is much more considerate of Denmark. I probably would have made a direct offer to the Greenlanders.
Ah well. You might be right, but on the other hand, I really doubt we've heard the last of things on this front.
Shrike
12hr ago
The teacher assessment was a survey on their grades, so not quite subjective. Re the second study:
Yes, but they also asked the teachers to evaluate their grit and self-control, if memory serves.
Really, Roma populations should be excluded from most studies.
Interesting.
Even if these are still small impacts, they are notable considering the short duration and relatively low intensity of our intervention and that evaluations of human capital interventions often yield fade-out effects over longer time periods
Right - if these minor efforts had good effects, it seems likely that a more prolonged effort earlier in life would have stronger impact.
That kind of sucks!
Again, you aren't addressing the point that studies that screen out environmental effects will screen out the effort OP wants to do.
If you told a youth that their hardest work will only move the needle by 1.7% annual earnings, he would probably conclude in himself that it’s not worth it to be faithful to the “gospel of hard work”.
If I told a youth this he would probably laugh at me for suggesting that getting lectured in class from time to time had that much of an impact on his life choices.
And if all that this can do is bring a 70k yearly salary up to 72k, it’s just not worth it.
I would happily accept a lecture telling me to work hard in exchange for an extra $100,000 over the course of a 50 year career! I would accept a lecture from you in exchange for $2000 right now! A monthly lecture, even!
Maybe there’s another study that finds a greater effect and I haven’t seen it?
Again, unless any of these studies you've dug up are looking at home life, we can assume that school intervention studies will control for home environment which means they tell us nothing about OP's plan.
Shrike
13hr ago
Denmark decided to give Greenland the right to secede, and by all accounts they want to leave, which puts current NATO security arrangements regarding Greenland in doubt.
I'm sympathetic to Europeans being upset about how this has been handled (and especially to Greenland independence) but every complaint about US behavior seems to completely gloss over these facts.
Shrike
17hr ago
For one, the whole "Europe freerider reeeeee-" screeching is stupid personal projection onto international relationships [...] It's gonna take another 8 years of an Obama tier genteel speechmaking lawyerly type to wash the stink off.)
Robert Gates, Obama's SecDef, specifically warned that European free-riding in NATO was causing serious problems back in 2010, during Obama's first term - more than 15 years ago, before Russia invaded Crimea or President Trump was even considered a serious possibility.
Despite this (and the subsequent deterioration of the European defense situation) it was not until 2024 that more than half of NATO countries met their 2% GDP defense spending benchmarks.
The trend is definitely much better now, but US defense thinkers have been warning about European allies free riding for decades, since the Clinton administration. Just accepting for the sake of argument that this has all been "stupid personal projection onto international relations," a wise strategist understands that in a democracy, it is quite possible for there to be a certain amount of such personal projection onto international relations and one should avoid doing things like "failing to meet mutual defense spending targets" specifically to avoid such wrongly-placed personal feelings.
Shrike
1d ago
Fair enough, I suppose. I'd still like to see that picture of the MQ-9 over Iran, and I will trade you this picture the Twitter OSINT guys geolocated today, pinpointing this B-52 carrying gravity bombs over Saudi Arabia.
Shrike
1d ago
The only evidence here
This isn't how evidence works. The photos I posted are evidence, they are just not necessarily conclusive evidence (as I myself pointed out).
There are other, non-conclusive reasons to think that the US is using gravity bombs well inland. For instance, WSJ is reporting that the spectacular strikes on Isfahan last night were reportedly carried out using 2,000-pound gravity bombs, likely from B-2s. Hesgeth announced that we are sending B-52s on overland strikes.
We know this because we've seen pictures of them posted and published many times.
I would like to see photos of MQ-9s operating over Iran from the last month, please link.
When it comes to manned aircraft, however, we see none of those photos anywhere but the extreme outliers of Iranian territory.
The fact that we aren't seeing cell phone photographs of tactical aircraft that can operate at night and cruise at tens of thousands of feet from a country with an internet blackout doesn't really mean much.
Check your camera roll: do you have any pictures of airliners cruising at 40,000 feet? If you do, they are almost certainly from the contrails, and you can almost certainly barely make out the airliner. Now imagine an aircraft that is smaller and faster at a similar altitude taking deliberate steps to avoid leaving a contrail. If someone did post pictures of them, you would dismiss it as having less evidentiary value than all of the other pictures I flagged for you, and I wouldn't blame you! Unless you have specialized equipment, you really won't catch meaningful pictures of aircraft operating at altitude.
This is doubly true if they are operating at night, which they may be primarily for the deep strikes, particularly against fixed targets.
You might be correct that most US strikes are using standoff munitions. I doubt this - at this point, given the reported sortie tempo, I suspect most strikes are using gravity bombs, although we might have an interesting discussion as to whether or not e.g. the JDAM-ER is a gravity or standoff weapon. But if you are correct, I do not think it would be because your timeline isn't flooded with pictures of US jets doing strafing runs over Tehran.
Russian helicopters are regularly prowling Ukrainian territory and are photographed constantly.
Why would the US send helicopters to do a job that tactical fixed winged aircraft can do better at less risk? Not only are rotary assets vulnerable to pretty much everything bigger than a handgun, their short range and (typically) lack of in-flight refueling mean that they would not be able to reach as far inland as tactical jets, and they would need to be based closer to Iran, making them even more vulnerable to being hit on the ground than fixed-wing aircraft are already (although expeditionary basing might counterbalance this), and they use smaller munitions with less range than US fixed-wing assets can use. The Russians have lost massive amounts of helicopters and attack aircraft tearing around at low altitude doing rocket runs for precisely these reasons. At least the Russians have a target list (mechanized formations) that helicopters are suited for; helicopters aren't really particularly well suited to find ballistic missile launchers or to hit hardened targets.
air superiority looks like
Technically, the definition of air superiority is "That degree of dominance in the air battle of one force over another which permits the conduct of operations by the former and its related land, sea and air forces at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force" and air supremacy as "That degree of air superiority wherein the opposing air force is incapable of effective interference" (page 2). I think the US has met the terms of not only air superiority but also air supremacy: Iran's opposing air force is incapable of effective interference. Both definitions are focused on the air battle. For the sake of argument, I suppose we could grant the US air supremacy (since the Iranian air force is not contesting the battlespace) but not air superiority, which would be an odd conclusion.
In contrast, Russia still has to deal with the Ukrainian Air Force, although I think they have have, at a minimum, achieved a "favorable air situation" (page 5).
It wouldn't surprise me if US planes very briefly cross into Iranian territory to drop bombs near the borders or coastlines, but I've seen nothing to think it's a regular occurrence or deep penetration of Iranian territory happens ever.
Do you think the US didn't hit Iranian enrichment facilities in Fordow and Natanz with gravity bombs last year, or do you think that Iranian air defense effectiveness has increased since then, despite a month of attacks on their air-to-surface weapons? Would those strikes not count as a "deep penetration" of Iranian territory?
To clarify a bit, my own belief is that the US believes it can deploy gravity bombs from tactical jets at acceptable risk over some portion of Iran, and is acting on this belief by doing so. Exactly what portion of the country is unclear to me, although it likely depends on the airframe. I do not believe the risk of operating over ~any portion of Iran has been reduced to zero and it would not surprise me if there were still portions of Iranian territory that were considered too risky to deploy gravity bombs against. However I do suspect that at this point in time more low-end weapons (e.g. JDAMs) are being employed offensively than high-end stand-off weapons (e.g. JASSM).
Shrike
2d ago
"Nefarious plot" is a very apt way to describe "cooking the heads of US intelligence personnel with a sound cannon."
Shrike
2d ago
No effect longterm when a student self-learns grit in a module.
I think these sorts of studies are really interesting but "giving kids a module on grit" is going to give you only limited information on the effects parents will have on their children over the course of a childhood.
But hey, let's get into them. Your first study I think is shaky in the sense that it relies purely, as far as I can tell, on subjective teacher ratings rather than even a cursory objective standard - and the study itself notes this problem. But regardless, it controls for environmental effects:
Such non-causal sources may be both genetic and environmental. For instance, the association may be due to common genetic influences (pleiotropy: the same genes affect multiple traits; MacKay17), or due to a rearing environment that is conducive to both cognitive and non-cognitive influences on school performance.
So if OP is trying to create a rearing environment that is "conducive to both cognitive and non-cognitive influences on school performance" this study, if it managed to control properly, would screen it out. Or in other words, if I'm reading it correctly, it doesn't say much if anything about the question at hand.
(It also says "it is well established that self-control and grit predict academic outcomes" so I stand by my claim that if you can choose this, you should.)
Finally, I think that 4.4% is not bad. If someone gave you a button and said "push this and you'll score four percent better on every test you take for the rest of your life, no downsides or other side effects" it would be obvious to push it.
Your second link says that grit is associated with positive life outcomes and can be influenced through school interventions:
Given the importance of grit for individual success and its apparent malleability through school-based interventions, it is natural to consider it as a promising target of education policy. Nevertheless, not all interventions scale up well. Several interventions are effective when implemented in smaller groups under strict quality control, but ineffective when they are offered universally under potentially less favorable conditions, so evaluations of scaled up version of programs that were effective at a smaller scale are of great academic and policy importance.
Needless to say, the OP's intervention is going to be implemented in a very small group; presumably he has no need for it to scale, unlike the people who wrote the study:
We ask whether improvements in students’ behaviors and academic achievement can be obtained through simple, inexpensive, easily implementable at-scale school-based grit interventions and the extent to which these programs can help to reduce achievement gaps of disadvantaged students.
Regardless, the study found small impacts for students at large and substantial impacts to Roma minorities. I agree with the authors:
This is remarkable given that our intervention was not particularly intensive, consisting of only one session a week for 5 weeks, and ended over a year before some of these impacts were measured.
(I will confess I only read through the end of the second section of this paper before posting because it is 44 pages long and I only had to read 5 pages to see that it was saying that at a very minor classroom intervention had lasting positive effects particularly for students whom could be expected to do poorly.)
Just like the other finding, this is a no-brainer if there are no downsides. Nor do either of these studies suggest that self-control and grit cannot be taught, particularly by parents over an extended period of time. For the state, there are probably going to be trades offs or financial costs to teaching these to children.
But OP is going to have to raise his kids one way or another. It seems to me that he might as well raise them to believe in grit and self-control. Even if the benefits on GPA and income are minor, developing a healthy internal locus of control can hedge against depression and anxiety, which is a good enough reason to encourage it in children.
Shrike
2d ago
there’s no compelling evidence that activating “hard work” (in contrast to simply work)
Okay. I'm not really sure we have any real difference of opinion here, since by "hard work" I don't necessarily mean "psychologically difficult." For instance, in my example above, Carlsen probably likes chess, people who shoot in rifle tournaments typically like shooting rifles, etc. But the truth remains that for lots of things (like, to use another one of my examples, test prep) people often don't like doing it, but they will be better off if they do.
When you squint at what an elite performer
I mean, I don't really know why the bar here is "elite performer." The OP said he wanted his kids to learn about achieving success through hard work. He didn't say "I want my kids to learn that through hard work they could achieve anything they want."
Usain Bolt is at an extreme tail and we shouldn't teach our kids to emulate him (at least not specifically, unless they also show extremely rare promise as athletes). I want my kids to be able to sit down and do test prep (even if they don't want to) to get a better grade than the one they could already have gotten. I don't particularly care if they are a world-class marathon runner.
Shrike
2d ago
The OP is specifically asking for advice on how to influence someone's early life, so (in theory) even if it's entirely correct that 100% of one's ability to do hard work is unchosen, OP could still succeed at giving his kids the ability to do hard work.
I think, intuitively, that it is common sense that you can choose to work hard, at least to a limited degree. I think most people have the experience of buckling down on an important or time-sensitive project, and easing up or even slacking off when things are less urgent (or when there's less external pressure), even if there's still work to be done. And so if you conceptualize "working hard" as choosing to buckle down relatively more and ease up relatively less, I think it's hard to argue that you can't "choose to work hard."
The question of whether or not choosing to do that consistently pays off commensurate to the effort is a much more interesting one and I think sort of depends on your goals. But it seems fairly clear that below a certain threshold of hard work (failing to study at all, to show up to work, etc.) you will suffer. And I think above a certain threshold of hard work, you will probably suffer too (if for no other reason than you need to sleep!)
Shrike
2d ago
Iranians are complaining that the US is dropping mines in Shiraz, about a hundred miles inland. As far as I can tell, these air-dropped mines don't even have wing kits so their range is very limited. Here's pictures of Israeli F-16s (not stealthy!) kitted out with cluster bombs, which likewise are not short ranged weapons. Here's the DVIDS link to images from Epic Fury, and here's a B-52, an F-18, an F-16, and an F-15 loaded up with gravity bombs.
You can of course wave away the DVIDS photos as head-fakes but when combined with the mines it seems pretty reasonable to believe that the US is doing strikes inland.
Shrike
2d ago
The notion that “hard work” is a toggleable feature in humans which has a role in their success may be a useful glue to keep poor people quiet and make the wealthy feel even prouder, but it is the least proven of all the possible factors of socioeconomic success.
I don't think you need a study to show this. Try:
- entering a marathon, boxing tournament, or other physical contest without practicing
- taking a test without any preparatory work or background knowledge
- shooting in a rifle tournament without any prep
And see how you compare to people who put the work in.
Or take the time to speak to someone who's worked at a test prep center - contrary to what you might hear in the IQ reductionist space, test prep works (or at least that is what I have been told by someone in the biz). Similarly, look at professional classical musicians or Olympians: they don't succeed without practicing a lot.
Certainly there might be exceptions (savants, people with unnatural size and strength, etc.) but for most people your odds of success improve via hard work.
Magnus Carlsen
Isn't it correct that Carlsen's father was a chess fan who introduced him to the game at 5 and he's been competing since he was 8?
I definitely think that something like innate talent or genius matters, particularly around the tails, but if you can choose to be a person with an internal locus of control who believes in hard work you should prefer this as long as you can temper it with the understanding that there is not a linear connection between hard work and success.
Shrike
5d ago
I tend to agree with what you've said here. I will offer two notes: firstly, from what I can tell, Russia has historically been extremely leery of giving Iran anything that could actually hurt Israel). I am not sure, however, if this would rule out bulk Shaheds. Also, there is no reason Israel can't just build their own Shaheds. The US does it. So it's possible (if unlikely) that in 2036 the Gulf region is just "everyone has 500,000 Shaheds" which would be sort of funny in a dark way, I suppose.
Shrike
5d ago
Ukraine was already providing that?
Yes, it is, but when the Arrow missile program was launched in the 1980s that was not really anticipated.
We also haven't been able to test Standards in Ukraine, and we have in Israel.
it's nowhere near enough to replenish them quickly
Just on the Navy front, on some quick Googling, the reports are that we're looking to increase production of the SM-6 and SM-3 to a combined total of 600/year. At 100 SM-3s annually, that would allow us to replace our stockpile of around 400 in just four years. At 500 SM-6s annually, that would allow us to replace our stockpiles of 1500 in three years.
As I pointed out in my other post to you, we're increasing Patriot production to 2,000 year, which is pretty eye-watering as far as interceptors go.
especially given we'll need quite literally an order of magnitude more to 1v1 China, which is a credible threat that again, we were supposed to be pivoting to!
Yes, one of the first things I said about this war was that that was a likely fail state.
And now he's throwing that away... Why again?
Well, I am kicking around some theories, but I'm saving them for a top-level post I will never write at this rate.
Shrike
5d ago
There's a reason we are bombing their industrial defense production. And, from what I can tell, there's good reasons at this point to think that Israel will just keep bombing those production facilities, particularly if Iran does not agree to an arms control agreement.
But let's assume that "mowing the lawn" doesn't happen. Wanna see me do some really sloppy analysis?
Iran first started producing ballistic missiles in the mid-late 1980s, so completely destroying their production entirely sets them back by 35 years of infrastructure and production. However, that's a naive estimate, because part of what's difficult about ballistic missiles is accumulating the knowledge to build them. I think we can assume that the US and probably more especially Israeli are attacking that accumulated knowledge, but it's more difficult to do that than it is to blow up a bunch of static buildings.
One estimate I found guessed that Iran could build 300 ballistic missiles and an eye-watering 10,000 Shaheds per month in peacetime.
This works out, in a very, very simplistic evaluative way, of Iran having the capability to build the facilities to produce about, let's say, 10 ballistic missiles per month every year, building up from 0 in 1990 to 300/month today.
It's a bit harder to evaluate the Shahed, but let's just say that they started the program in 2016, since there is at least some evidence of it being used in 2019 (they may have acquired blueprints for a similar design around 2004 but I like 2016 since it gives us a nice round ten years). That suggests it takes a mere 1 year to build out the capability to produce 1000 Shaheds per month.
So if we assume for the sake of easy math that Iran has to rebuild their ballistic missile program entirely from scratch and progressively ramps up manufacturing, we find that their ballistic missile production ramps up like so:
Year 1: 0 stockpiled, 0 production capability
Year 2: 0 stockpiled, 120 production capability
Year 3: 120 stockpiled, 240 production capability
Year 4: 360 stockpiled, 360 production capability
Year 5: 720 stockpiled, 480 production capability
720 sounds like a lot, but the US will have built 3000 Patriots in that time at 2026 production levels plus the excess Patriots manufactured as the US ramps up from 600 produced to 2000 produced per year between 2026 and 2033. It's unclear to me what the Israeli production rates are, but 200 annually of Stunner and Arrow-3 doesn't seem insane. So in 5 years it seems plausible that the Israeli or even a fraction of US interceptor capability will be able to handle the bulk of the Iranian ballistic missile threat.
Shahed numbers will be considerably higher, however, since our estimate is that they are 100 times as easy to produce. So in five years, we can expect 72,000 Shaheds, right around the 80,000 my source gives as an estimate of Iran's stockpiles at the start of this conflict. But, BAE is producing 25,000 APKWS guidance kits per year, and last year a new Iron Dome facility opened in Arkansas that is supposed to be able to produce 2,000 Iron Dome rockets per year. That works out to around 125,000 APKWS and 10,000 Iron Dome rockets to intercept the 72,000 Shaheds.
NOW, I don't think there's really any reason to think that the US will divert every single one of their APKWS to Israel, but there are a lot of cheap anti-drone systems coming online now, like the Martlet (which is expected, I think, to be sold to countries in the Gulf, although perhaps not Israel) and Iron Beam, and this doesn't take into account other defenses (like conventional air-to-air missiles or even the 30mm on Apaches). So it doesn't seem impossible that even against Shaheds, in 5 years there will be a lot of cheap defenses proliferated in the region.
Obviously, this is a VERY CRUDE TOY MODEL that is likely significantly off from what we will see in real life. It doesn't take into account cost, either, and from what I understand Iran in particular is under some financial strain at the moment, although they also are building relatively cheap offensive weapons. But the fun thing is that you can plug in whatever numbers you want (e.g. 500 baseline ballistic missiles and 2000 baseline Shaheds in stockpiles, or a residual production capability, or larger production numbers for the US+Israel to represent increasing Patriot and APKWS production, etc.) and see how the math works out.
While I don't think this is "realistic," I do think it suggests that Iran in 5 years will probably be less capable than they were at the start of this fight as regards ballistic missile stockpiles. Meanwhile we can anticipate advancements both technologically and in production from anti-missile systems over in the next 5 years. So there's actually at least some reason to think that the balance of power in the region will shift if Iran's production capabilities are significantly reduced.
Shrike
5d ago
What is the upside here again?
"Live weapons test zone" is probably considered more of an upside by American MIC types than you would think. In particular systems like Arrow and David's Sling (which are both co-developed by major American arms manufacturers) are helpful to the US as they increase our technology and (at least secondhand) experience with ballistic missile interception, which is very important to maintaining the relevancy of the US military pretty much everywhere, as ballistic missiles are now a pretty widespread technology.
The US buying Iron Dome (which is now also being co-produced by American contractors) to fulfill their point-defense needs is an example of that dynamic running full circle.
Shrike
5d ago
Evangelicals have high birth rates, but also low retention rates into adulthood.
No, this isn't true at all. Evangelicals have the best retention rates among Christians, about three-quarters retention (and this includes evangelicals who switch to other Christian traditions, so the number of people raised evangelical who remain Christian is even higher).
Gays have lower fertility than straights, so surely we will have no gays at all within a few generations!
Ha ha, but while we're here, gays are significantly more likely to be party to a teenaged pregnancy than straights, so if the gay gene is real and gets flushed out of the gene pool, it's likely because of abortion, not because of their sexual preferences.
Me normally: "US intervention in Iraq was a mistake, US hegemony has gone too far, we need to pull back, maybe focus on deterring China,"
Me after one (1) drink (of Spite): "...there's still time. We could put the 82nd in London. The people would greet us as liberators! Armored columns could reach Vancouver and Montreal in less than 12 hours. We'd need to arm the moderate Welsh, of course, and the Catalan separatists..."
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