Shrike
2d ago
I think these are all arguments to colonize the moon first as a trial run. The moon is much cheaper, much closer, and very easy to get back from if something goes wrong. The radiation from travel is comparatively minor, the travel time is much shorter, and you can bury yourself under the lunar regolith and chill without worrying about radiation overmuch. The moon has a lot of materials that can be used for spacecraft manufacturing, making the moon a natural hub for the production of spacecraft in low gravity. Over time this would reduce costs, likely even for placing Earth satellites (since it's cheaper to launch from the moon than the Earth).
I also question whether the Biosphere-type experiments are directly relevant to a space colony. A colony on Mars or even the moon won't be a sealed landscape even if it's not receiving meaningful resources from Earth. If the air starts to go bad in a biosphere, you're toast. If it starts to go bad on Mars, you can just...manufacture more air. The problem set of "sustaining life on Mars" is not exactly the same as the problem set of balancing an ecosystem in e.g. Biosphere 2. You can just manipulate the atmosphere however you desire it, and then grow food with an eye to "what do I need to eat" rather than "how will this balance the ecoystem." There are some pretty cool ideas for long-term terraforming but in my opinion if Mars can get a self-sufficient industrial stack, the biological stack will be doable. This isn't to say that either would be a trivial problem, just that "Biosphere 2" isn't the correct model for an initial space colonization effort.
In space, there is almost 0 monetary incentive for colonization. Satellites and telecommunications operate fine without any human astronauts, and even asteroid mining, which is a dubious economic proposition in the first place, doesn't really benefit from humans being in space
This isn't exactly true inasmuch as the closer you are, the less time-lag there is for robotic control. It's also probably true that at a certain point of industrial complexity, it's easier just to have a human in a space suit doing repairs than it is to have a robot to fix a robot to fix a robot that can fix the robot. And there are certain types of complex manufacturing (such as semiconductors) that might benefit from a space environment.
But you've forgotten the most persuasive reason to do space colonization, which is to move all gain of function research offworld and to a place we can easily glass without harming any civilians.
Shrike
2d ago
The US is in the lead in this research, admittedly.
It seems this way.
Moreover China is likely to do a blockade and bombardment, as dictated by the common sense.
As Colby points out in Strategy of Denial, blockade compulsion strategies rarely compel surrender. Now, I am not sure if the historical inferences hold given the modern necessity for energy but on the other hand if you're going to insist the historical record shows that amphibious assaults often work, I'm going to remind you that blockades and bombardments (by themselves) often do not.
"Taiwan only has 2 suitable beaches" is a hypothesis fit for a shithole without shipbuilding industry, pardon my French.
Yes, I also think that an air assault is a viable strategy in addition to landing at pretty much any point across the island. This doesn't change the fundamental problem(s) with an assault on Taiwan. The barges are nice but they don't magically overcome the advantage of interior lines. And so forth.
The advantages of Chinese industry are compounding very quickly, they've reached escape velocity of sorts. The US definitely can improve but the gap is likely to get wider over the next decade or two.
So far the Chinese appear to be behind the United States (alone, and Australia, Japan, and South Korea are also relevant players here) in submarine manufacturing (quality and tonnage), space-to-orbit launch tonnage, aircraft manufacturing (quality, possibly still airframes as well, particularly considering US exports), directed energy weapons, and, if it matters, oil production and artificial intelligence. They do build a lot of boats, but the US and its allies can build antiship weapons faster and cheaper than China can build boats.
This is also why they can put EMALS on 076, on some trucks, on trucks stacked on a container ship, basically play with it like LEGO. This again is illustrative of the disparity in industrial capacity and diversity and prospects for military procurement in the years to come.
It's illustrative of your tendency to take something innovative and cool the Chinese have done (in a mock-up, mind you), not look for and therefore not find a comparable US example, and then declare the war over in favor of China. The US doing actual procurement such as putting lasers on their submarines (publicized 2020), flying next-gen fighter aircraft (also 2020), or flying a secret stealth electronic attack aircraft for over a decade (likely spotted 2014) - not interesting, nothing to see here.
this is dubious because the core feature and design principle of J-36 is overpowered electric generation and radars (again building on their civilian advantages) so at the very least they can be expected to notice your Rhinos first
You haven't thought through the implications of what you are saying. Now, there's doubtless a lot of secret sauce when it comes to the fine details of these things and how they work, but the laws of physics presumably still apply, and due to the inverse-square law, we should expect radar-warning receivers to detect emitters before the emitters detect a radar signature. I'll let you work out the implications of turning on that overpowered radar in a world of air-to-air antiradiation missiles.
This doesn't mean the J-36 is useless, by the way.
Broke-ass Communist Russians with inferior metrology did it.
No they did not. The Russians were genuinely ahead in speed which is impressive in its own right, but they still haven't caught up to American quieting in nuclear submarines.
that's a popular cope.
Not really "cope" so much as "a good idea" - the US government just launched copies of a Shahed at Iran and I think that's smart. I'm genuinely curious, while we're on the topic, to get your assessment of how the recent accusation by Anthropic that Deepseek used data harvesting to build their model.
Look, my position on the whole US v. China thing has not been US triumphalism. It's a war we could lose. But Chinese triumphalism rankles me the same way. It's very wrong to extrapolate from Venezuela and Day Two of Iran and conclude China would be a pushover too. But it's also very wrong to extrapolate from Chinese civilian shipbuilding numbers and conclude the US of A would be a pushover.
their representative insists on Chinese identity, is friendly towards Xi and opposes Taiwanese independence.
Going entirely off of this Wikipedia article, one could just as easily say that she opposes CCP rule over Taiwan, supports the status quo (the mainstream view), and wants closer relations with the United States.
This is almost certainly the best position for Taiwan to take, by the way, there's no point in provoking the mainland without material gain.
Things can change fast.
Yes.
Shrike
2d ago
Within a decade it's more likely that both sides have directed energy interception, which introduces its own problems.
The US and likely China already have this to a limited degree.
You're still living in this popular dream scenario where the opponent is static but the US is constantly improving.
No, not at all. The problem for China is that amphibious assaults are fundamentally difficult. The problem of the United States and Taiwan is that they haven't taken advantage of that. It's infinitely easier to procure for a Taiwan contingency than it is to change Taiwan's geography.
(Hence also all the embarrassing stuff about "not letting China win in robotics/industry" when they're like a century ahead.)
I'd say if anything, you're the one in the fantasy dream scenario where the opponent is static but China is constantly improving. It seems to me you have a habit of taking relatively minor things as data points that build towards US comparative decline.
For instance, here you cite the fact that the US hasn't launched the F-35 using EMALs as a US L. Now, launching their stealth fighter off of their electromagnetic catapult system is certainly a W for the Chinese but if you lurked online in the right places you'd know the Navy has been happy with the F/A-18E/F and have not been in a rush to procure the F-35, which they are less happy with. The Navy's been skeptical about the effectiveness of stealth against Chinese systems and seems to be dissatisfied with their relationship with Lockheed. As I understand it, the Ford hasn't launched the F-35 because it hasn't gotten the necessary upgrades and it will at some point when the Navy does a refit on the ship. And while it's very typical to be wowed by "5th gen fighter" you of all people should be skeptical of Lockheed Martin's marketing: the truth is that your "aircraft generation" doesn't matter all that much, and Rhinos are perfectly capable of shooting down F-35s (including in beyond-visual-range combat) and will likely be capable of shooting down whatever 6th generation aircraft the Chinese push out, because air combat is more complicated than "numbers go up, higher numbers better."
(This cuts both ways, btw, nobody should think that the Chinese will be a pushover because Iran bought one of their radars and "it didn't work.")
It's not just a matter of buildup, they're not just an assembly floor, you're improving slower than them technologically.
Yeah, because the Chinese are operating from a technological inferior position and are converging on the position of the United States. They're likely decades behind in some very important areas, such as submarine quieting, and as they get data en masse from Russia or the United States via industrial espionage their technological level will improve (and has improved) very quickly. Extrapolating these trend lines out to infinity isn't the proper way to evaluate the situation.
Taiwanese might be more interested or, rather, less opposed to unification because the US is rapidly depleting their Silicon Shield in preparation for vacating the island, also coercing them into undesirable investment plans and imposing unfair tariffs.
Do let me know when that shows up in the polling data.
Too late, too much main character syndrome.
I've screamed on here since forever that pushing Russia and China together was a bad idea but it seems to me that the United States remains better at coalition-building than China.
Shrike
3d ago
You'd expect it to be the US Navy that tried to end the F-15's perfect K/D ratio
Shrike
3d ago
the Taiwanese are not as hostile to unification as many imagine.
It looks like about 7% of Taiwanese support unification. Support for unification is trending down over the decades; about 20% supported unification in 1994. Most Taiwanese either want to maintain the status quo indefinitely (about a third), kick the can down the road (about a quarter), or move towards independence without burning any bridges right now (about one-fifth).
A lot of people have convinced themselves that the longer things go on the stronger China will become. I tend to think the opposite. Allowing the United States and its allies half a decade to prepare for a Taiwan contingency might render all of the squabbling over whether or not aircraft carriers are survivable with a ballistic missile threat essentially moot; the US will plausibly be able spam so many antiship missiles from every corner of the first island chain that it will be the Chinese who are having interceptor shortfalls.
This would all be moot, of course, if Taiwanese were more interested in unification in five years, but right now I have no reason to believe that will be meaningfully the case.
The only reason to fight China is out of boredom.
The US has a pretty normal national interest in preventing China from gaining hegemony over the most valuable parts of the world (measured by GDP), for a couple of reasons. One of them is just preventing rival economic/geopolitical entities from forming. One of them is to avoid triggering a nuclear arms race.
Shrike
3d ago
Worth noting that Iran backed the Houthis in their attempts to shut down international trade - the US has a longstanding tradition, going all the way back to its earliest years of an independent country, of going to war if anyone touches our international trade.
Also worth noting it is greatly in the interests of the United States to prevent other countries from getting nuclear weapons, and to deter other countries from acquiring such weapons. It might backfire in this case, but it might also keep a few wobblers on the fence.
Note also that allegedly not only Israel but also the Saudis were pressing Trump to bomb Iran. Note also that the Saudis can probably acquire nuclear weapons fairly quickly, and they [more] likely would if the Iranians became a nuclear power.
There's also the increased ability to control world oil supplies that others have mentioned.
Finally, Iran constructively killed a lot of Americans during the GWOT by backing anti-coalition forces in Iraq.
I'm not sure any of these are really the deciding factor here but it's not like the US gets nothing. If nothing else, it gets revenge.
Shrike
3d ago
Everything I've read says that the US has lost absolutely zero planes so far,
The most recent reporting suggest Kuwait shot down three F-15Es in a friendly-fire incident.
See: https://www.twz.com/air/f-15-spins-into-the-ground-while-on-fire-in-middle-east
Shrike
3d ago
Russia's is just leftover Soviet junk
No, this isn't true. I mean, their missiles might not work, but the Russians have been constantly modernizing their nuclear arsenal. At this point, I think it is newer than the American nuclear arsenal (although that might not account for maintenance and regeneration with new parts). We haven't replaced the Minuteman yet and the Russians are operating a number of ICBMs fielded after the Cold War.
Shrike
3d ago
I think I saw recent supposed estimates that Iran had 2,500 ballistic missiles left. And the US used about 150 missiles/20% of its entire THAAD stockpiles last summer during the last shooting match. But those are public numbers, so take them with a grain of salt.
However the Iranian tactic of "launch ballistic missiles at all our neighbors" might mean the US will end up using fewer interceptors than it otherwise would have.
Shrike
4d ago
There's always the off chance that, e.g., an Iranian drifting mine sinks an aircraft carrier, but I think the big-time failure case here is that the US expends 500 interceptors swatting Iranian SRBMs and then China rolls Taiwan because we can't keep them from plastering Guam with reentry vehicles twice daily.
Shrike
5d ago
Ten years ago (2016) Trump was still in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (a deal he did not make). Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 after Israel published evidence that Iran had not come clean about a past nuclear weapons program, as required by JCPOA. Therefore, unless either my (very surface-level) understanding of what JCPOA requires is incorrect or Israel's documents are fraudulent, it seems trivially true that Iran violated the deal and likely went into it under false pretenses.
This does not necessarily mean that withdrawing from the JCPOA was a good idea, but it also seems like perhaps, under the circumstances, skepticism about the ability to honor agreements might be better directed at Iran, which plausibly entered the deal with no intent to honor it.
Shrike
5d ago
If your Glock comes with a ten side acceptable use policy, then the correct response is to not buy a Glock.
There is where the AI hype comes back to bite the AI companies. If AI is an existential issue then, well, you can't treat it like a Glock.
Shrike
6d ago
Well, should they despite your predictions manage to fix it to your satisfaction, my DMs are open if you want to give it a shot sometime.
Shrike
9d ago
This is interesting to contrast with American conduct during the Revolutionary War, where marksmen at Cowpens and Saratoga took particular aim at enemy officers.
Although I don't recall off the top of my head if I've ever read if the stigma trickled down to more junior officers. At Saratoga General Fraser was legendarily targeted, but the legend is of dubious provenance, and perhaps he was killed by a stray shot.
Shrike
10d ago
Broken Arrow
Huh, I haven't played in a while, but I like to think I'll bump into you if/when I pick it up again.
Unless you're a Russian cruise missile main, of course... ;)
(Also, great idea for a test.)
Shrike
10d ago
This is a very interesting question, and I think my answer would depend on the specifics (my apologies - I know this is not a satisfying answer). I think sometimes people reframe natural divisions as "disfavored groups" - for instance someone complaining about how "disfavored groups" have a social norm of having to work to sustain themselves - wherein the disfavored group is "adults." But I think a lot of times a social norm of disparate treatment breeds resentment that is itself a bad thing.
Still, if we imagine that only women aren't allowed to play loud music in the library...I might bite the bullet and hope that doing so reduces my odds of hearing loud music at all.
Shrike
10d ago
The Church of Mike Huckabee likely won't exist in any recognizable way in 100 years
To my point, Huckabee's tradition, like the Catholic one, is distinctly and recognizably Christian. His views on the Jews and/or eschatology is not meaningfully more unusual or anti-Christian than the views of many historical Catholic religious leaders. In fact, it's unclear to me that the Christian Zionism at issue here isn't shared by many American Catholics, who are about as likely as Jews to say that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God. (Perhaps this dovetails into what I've posted before about the dangers of Catholic triumphalism, although note that I am rather optimistic about the future of Catholicism in the states.)
Anyway, if it matters, I Googled one of the churches Huckabee preached at (Beech Street First Baptist Church) and found that it was founded in 1904. Pretty okay odds it makes it to 2126. Likewise, I'd be surprised if the Southern Baptist Convention (founded 1845) had disappeared in 100 years, barring eschatological events or the like. The idea of Christian Zionism, of course, goes back much further than either institution.
Now, from my perspective, what's shared by the diverse Christian groups is more important than what divides them. The vast majority of Christians are, well, Christian. It's in that sense that I suggest that Huckabee is your ally, your meaningful disagreements aside.
Shrike
10d ago
No disagreement from me on that. If anything those seem higher priority to me.
Also - in case it's not clear - I'm not trying to pick on you. Merely suggest what I think is a pretty defensible explanation for the norm. I think it's helpful for understanding society to be able to separate out "morally wrong" from "norm" while also leaving room for norms to exist.
Shrike
10d ago
Yes, from my perspective (a Catholic) Huckabee is in an insane, anti-christian cult with absolutely insane beliefs. My (somewhat unrelated) point is that this is why you need The Church.
I would like to gently propose that history suggests that merely having The Church doesn't prevent people in power from developing ideas about Palestine that might be considered by many unusual or harmful, and that despite your understandably vehement theological disagreements with Huckabee he's probably more your ally (theologically and otherwise!) than most.
Shrike
10d ago
This seems plausible, but it doesn't really account for societal disapproval of a relationship between someone who is 70 and someone who is 24.
It's really not ideal (from a childbearing perspective) for a woman who is in her peak fertile years to be with a guy who is pretty far past his most fertile years (the persistence of male fertility notwithstanding). This might not be the explanation for the actual negative reactions of people, but it is probably good to keep in mind, although obviously it applies mostly to really big gaps like the one mentioned above.
A lot of people have spoken (correctly, I think) about the female jealousy angle, but I think it's also correct that guys don't want people their dad's age elbowing in on their mating pool. And it's bad for romance and male-female relations for men (and women) to start to think of romantic or sexual relationships as one where a woman tries to get as much money/status-adjacency out of a man. (Obviously this does not describe all age-gap relationships.)
The way I tend to think about this is that although it's not really morally wrong for age-gap relationships to exist (presuming no age of consent or other issues) but it's probably good for society to put a few cultural norms that hedge against it, to keep it from being normalized. If older men and younger women were typical, you'd see reduced fertility and a lot of angry young men. All things being equal, it's best if the norm if most people get married relatively young.
Shrike
10d ago
I'm suggesting that in this new world, SCOTUS could hand down a decision, and by the next week various state legislatures could be passing bills that are competently written specifically to thwart/loophole those decisions.
Are you sure this hasn't already happened? Trigger laws already exist, which accomplish the same thing in substance.
Either way, it seems to me that the bottleneck now is mostly the legislative schedule and the court's hearing schedule. If legislatures and courts use LLMs to speed things up (far-out now but not impossible), I could see real gains being made to the speed there the entire cycle.
I guess the logical end-point of this is multi-agent negotiation between the LLM representatives of the state, the legislature, the courts, and various interest groups, all negotiating, passing, and striking down new laws millions of times a year. Humans might not notice this, of course, since at this point the laws might mostly bind the LLMs...
(Hope this isn't a repost, looks like my first comment got eaten by the cyber gremlins!)
Shrike
12d ago
President Trump could try to get his tariff agenda passed in Congress.
Even if unnecessary legally, this would be preferable because it would curb the enthusiasm of other governments to try to wait it out for a few years.
Shrike
12d ago
It will be interesting to see if people view the LLM as more authoritative, though. Lawyers will take losing cases if they are going to be paid for them.
Shrike
12d ago
I suspect now its as easy as "read this Appellate decision and find me six possible loopholes or procedural methods to delay its implementation to achieve my client's goals, make sure to check the entire corpus of Law Journal Articles for creative arguments or possible alternative interpretations of existing law. Make no mistakes."
I don't know that this is a big improvement over Westlaw, at the societal level. At the level of an individual lawyer, maybe, but bigshot appellate firms have a lot of legal hours to noodle on these problems and clients who will pay for those hours.
And my impression is litigants react to changes in caselaw very quickly. If SCOTUS makes a major decision, interested litigators will move very rapidly to bring cases under that new decision. Look at how many shots gun rights groups have taken at SCOTUS recently.
This might not be as far-fetched as you think; SENTIENT can probably locate Chinese road-based ICBMs from orbit. China's other deterrence methods are pretty vulnerable to a first strike: their SSBNs are noisy, although they might be safe in their bastions, the many collisions between US/UK submarines and Russian SSBNs during the Cold War suggest otherwise, bombers are typically easy to see and strike unless they are kept at ready alert, which as far as I know is not the case for the Chinese nuclear air arm, and their silo-based launchers are liquid-fueled and seem unlikely to survive long enough to be launched in the event of a first strike.
On the defense side, @BahRamYou also hasn't mentioned the AIM-174, which can probably be used as a terminal ballistic missile interceptor, and by virtue of being carried via aircraft, is likely more flexible than THAAD.
Still likely much too dicey to risk!
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