BahRamYou
3d 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
4d 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
4d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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)
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.
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