IntronExon

I’m asking a question you seem unwilling to answer. You invoked national security as a motivation to stay on the cutting edge of military science. I’m asking just what your definition encompasses, and pointing out that it’s clearly not just the sanctity of our borders. Traditionally national security is about the security of a nation, not securing its dominance; the latter goes by a different name. Our vast nuclear arsenal secures the former, but not the latter.

There's also an argument to be made that remaining on the cutting edge of military science is a form of national security.

Your words, I’m asking who’s security? Our security while we pretend to own the world? Our security against invasion? How secure do we need to be, when we can already end all human life in 45 minutes?

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...

That’s tens of millions, and I’m being generous in ignoring how you’ve moved the goalposts. Your thesis is simply unsupportable, sorry.

Besides, we don’t know what the future holds, but in terms of raw possibilities we can now end all human life on Earth thanks to technology. That’s also new in the last 70 years. Hopefully we’ll never do it, but we could. Thst also flies in the face of the “technology reduces casualties” business. Of course, so does all of human history for thousands of years, but hey, let’s keep it simple.

How many thermonuclear weapons do we need to be secure? Secure from what? Invasion? No one is invading a nuclear power.

Oh for sure, you can get much more bang for your buck out of a swarm of MIRV’ed ICBMs carrying megatons of hydrogen bombs than bayonets and muskets. I mean, just try ignoring intersecting blast waves and thermal pulses! And chlorine gas? Pffft, piss on your socks and you can breathe through them but try that shit with VX!

Get it?

The word used is “outraged” and not “surprised” though. I think that’s more than just a semantic point. In fact there is no mention of surprise in the article. I think that’s a reasonable reaction, whereas surprise is a straw man, largely implying a naïveté which is notably absent in the article.

While those camps were morally reprehensible and constitutionally indefensible, the goal was not to kill people. Can we at least agree that the whole , “A secret court has ordered your death from the sky,” thing is a lot more purposefully murderous? Not capture, not detain, just kill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/drone-strikes-...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...

Whatever you think of civilian deaths, don’t forget that we assasinated 6 US citizens without a trial. Freedoms my ass. What about the freedom of people attending a wedding or receiving medical treatment not to be killed? If this was another country doing the same to the US, would your non-argument hold water?

Absolutely, but my point is that the cost is reasonable, the wages are not, and that implies a fix. Moreover, the fix doesn’t lie with Patagonia. Even more, if the true cost of things like clothing weren’t extermslized brutally, Americans would be far more aware of the pressing need for said fix.

Maybe the real difference is that some of us lack the empathy and imagination to consider the plight of some poor bastardized having their wedding, school, or hospital drone-striked, and some of us do. For those who can’t, this is never an emotional issue, just a sterile cost/benefit analysis. Formthe rest of us, worlds die in those blasts, and were partially responsible, and that matters.

That sounds like a problem with depressed wages, not the price of the coat.

For values or “us” which are nuclear powers and their close allies. Of course if “thanks to technology” we end up destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons, climate change, or something as yet unforeseen then really what has come of it? Fixing nitrogen for fertilizer also led to the democratization of high explosives. Nuclear power and weapons are linked.

Look away from your personal circumstances for a minute and consider the trajectory overall, for everyone, and not just you. This Panglossian “optimism” is downright destructive. It feels a lot like being in an airplane which has entered an unpowered, uncontrolled descent, and the guy next to tells you to be happy, it’s a miracle that we’re flying, humans never flew in all of history until recently.

Not a problem, I was wrong and appreciate the feedback.

I appreciate the feedback and agree, I did a poor job. Hopefully my edit has added some much-needed substance.

To add to what Kitsune has said, the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers. The other part is that for the first time in over a thousand years, Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars.

Time will tell. Bangladesh is grossly overpopulated, and struggling with hydrological and agricultural issues which may yet lead to systems collapse. India may thrive, or die in nuclear fire along with Pakistan. Until pretty recently tech was great for Syria too, but again, chicken, eggs, hatch.

There are the big twin baddies of climate change and mass migration to contend with, and nobody seems to be contending. We’re in a decent place, but I would argue, a profoundly negative trajectory. In the same way that the Late Bronze Age was both a time of wonders, and utterly doomed.

Understood, I edited it to include more details about what I was trying to get across.

Ok, let’s look at the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Edit: Or better yet, stick with my original example of the DRC, which is not a happy tale.

Now let’s just apply some regional filters there, so that skyrocketing benefits for a minority don’t play statistical games with the majority.

Not what they’re signaling... https://www.38north.org/2018/03/yongbyon030518/

...just what they’re selling. This is the usual cycle of trying to look good internally by squeezing concessions out of the rest of the world. This time they’re asking for a “security guarantee” from the US, which means no US troops on the peninsula. Last time it was just trying to get money, food, and fuel.

They’re not crazy, they’re criminal, and they are damned good at exploiting others with a combination of threats and promises, all while never diverting from their real goals.

This sort of rhetoric is borderline insane, though. Yes, bad things happen even with tech. But they are typically far less dramatic than what happened before the tech.

Oh totally, war was much less dramatic before atomic bombs. /s

Edit for substance: Tech is a massively double-edged sword, and looking only at the benefits is dishonest. You have nuclear power, which is truly amazing, and nuclear weapons, which may yet end us all. You have vaccines, but also biological weapons, medicines and poisons, better plows, better swords. You can argue that tech is a net positive, but if it’s anything, it is dramatic.

The answer is obvious, but not easy or likely. If Google stood to lose their workforce as a result, this would not be happening. Of course people like comfort and money too much to do that, and they’ll tell themselves it’s not their responsibility and hey, someone else will happily take their job. This is after all, a workforce that has concluded that privacy is something to be monetized and subverted at every turn for similar reasons.

...for some. It’s a bit less clear if you’re a kid mining cobalt in the DRC, right? The wonders of tech probably don’t matter to teen who is doxxed and bullied until they take their own life. Tech might not have improved the lives of people who lost their jobs to “gig” workers who are paid a fraction of minimum wage. Tech has downright hurt the environment, even if you only look at sheer waste. You probably don’t appreciate the future of drones if your experience with them is being bombed by them.

So yeah, if you can afford it, tech is wonderful. If you’re a Chinese Uigher, maybe not so much, and “any talk to the contrary” is disingenuous at best.

Asteroid mining and orbital construction would require trillions in investment, and years of focused work by a number of institutions. As far as I can tell, Musk uses that rhetoric for PR, and it works. So far an electric car company and rockets suited for LEO don’t add up to grand space adventures.

You're in pretty dangerous territory when you start to justify censorship because the right people are getting censored. Censors, be they government or not, never think they're censoring the wrong people, they always think they're doing the right thing.

I’m not making that argument, and I’m not diving into the bottomless pit or what people “feel” is censorship, when it’s appropriate, etc. HN exists by virtue of constructively and carefully applied censorship, with a specific and stated goal to avoid degradation and collapse. Censorship is a tool like any other, none of us should expect to be free from it. Government censorship is a whole other matter, but fortunately the 1st ammendement protects against that.

To the rest, I’ve been hearing the same “if’s” from the same bad actors for decades. After all, when a good argument or cause is absent, out come the slippery slopes. I’m just tired of it. It always seems to come down to a plea for assholes to be given deference, and anything short of that is “censorship”. Please.

They do very little that want previously covered by other, better sources. As a bonus, I don’t have to sift through a mess for that information. Sadly, Ars has mostly become a sort of digest for tech/science. So for me, they’re not worth the time, never mind the money.

That first thread is a train wreck; here is a guy who has no idea what real accountability looks like. It’s kind of amusing when you consider Reddit’s broader ambitions, because someone like Spez is going to be first on the chopping block. At the very least, they need to hire someone who understands the first thing about PR and customer relations, just to staunch the bleeding.

When you’re confronted with evidence that your site hosts material including animal torture and dead babies, the correct response is to demonstrate your humanity, not your total lack thereof.

A few years ago I would have thought Ars was worth it, but it has since slipped below the “worth my time” threshold, aka “not even for free.” I’m glad that they finally realized a significant portion of their audience use script and ad blockers, often with a VPN; that’s something at least.

Translation: They’re willing to see how much they can get for promising to do things they have no intention of ever doing.

Ever since I turned on “show dead” I’ve noticed that too. Of course the sheer volume of spam that’s intercepted thst way is impressive too. The mods are so responsive that I think on balance, it’s a very good sauce.