I'm not sure I see the relevance of your question since what you're asking for is a necessary quantity not a necessary level of innovation. There could be lots of reasons to develop a better thermonuclear weapon even if it's never put into use. Innovation in that area would help us to gauge the difficulty of miniaturizing such a device and, if it turns out to be difficult but possible, whether or not modern technology makes such a feat possible for a hostile non-nation group such as a terrorist organization. In the situation being discussed in the article, the argument would be that remaining on the cutting edge of drone technology allows us to evaluate the threat that drones could pose to our navy if a situation like the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis ever happened again.
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?
If you don't agree with a part of what I've said then you're more than welcome to articulate your objections instead of asking a series of rhetorical questions. It's clear that you have strong feelings on the topic but at this point you're not trying to have a discussion you're just being belligerent.
You've posted so many low-quality comments and skirted the site guidelines consistently enough that I've banned this account.
Accounts that post prodigious low-quality comments, especially ones that specialize on all the grandiose themes, are particularly damaging to signal/noise ratio, and that is what we care about here.
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.
You've posted such a huge number of low-quality comments to Hacker News that I've banned this account.
You also broke the site guidelines repeatedly after we asked you not to, and went into ideological flamewar repeatedly after we asked you not to. I have to conclude that this is not an account that wants to use HN as intended.
And if you read my replies you'll notice that I gave two examples. In response to your fixation on nuclear weapons I pointed out that developing better designs could be helpful with regard to maintaining an awareness of if modern technology has made some producing some version of the weapon, in my example it was a miniaturized version of the weapon, possible for a terrorist organization. I don't feel like it's asking too much to expect you to realize why that might be a useful thing to know for protecting the nation. In my other example I highlighted that having a cutting edge understanding of drone technology could be useful for defending our navy in the event that we another crisis similar to the time we sent ships to guard Taiwan. Given that the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis happened well within recent history I don't think it's unrealistic to suggest preparing for an analogous situation could be beneficial in the event that it should happen again but escalate this time.
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.
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?
> Wars always have casualties. Technology helps to reduce them. In WW2 it was normal to wipe whole cities using bombs.
Large scale aerial bombardment of cities in WWII was enabled by advances in technology in the period shortly before that period, so it's really not a good thing to bring up to support a blanket “technology helps reduce them” claim about casualties.
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!
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.
It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens".
Now imagine death toll if US would directly fight war with USSR over Europe.
And yes, it includes Vietnam and Korean wars, where high precision weapons weren't used yet.
> It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens".
The total casualties in the wars between the superpower-led coalitions substantially exceed the casualties caused by the US military in those wars. (And, in any case, yes, in the normal way terms of scale are used, a number ≥ 10^7 and < 10^8 is usually described as “tens of millions”.)
Without WW2 and Enigma, who knows when, or even if, computers might have developed? 20 years later, 40?
Technology of the airplane went from the first 200kts monoplanes, through to the hard limits of propeller aviation, and the birth of jets and rocketry by the end of the war.
Without the development of tacho bomb sights (eg Norden and Mk XIV), mass bombing would not have been worthwhile, as it was too inaccurate. They would lead to inertial guidance systems, enabling the ICBM.
Technology was the enabler of most of those deaths.
In fairness, can you name a time in WW2 where the US government intentionally killed US citizens without regard to due process? There is supposed to be a strict separation of never using the military against the citizens of the united states. We have the national guard for a reason. Capturing those targets wasn't an objective, the government wanted them dead and it didn't afford any of those American citizens the rights laid out in the constitution.
There is supposed to be a strict separation of never using the military against the citizens of the united states.
Due process and judicial process in a courtroom are not the same thing. Your citizenship isn't a bubble you carry around with you that gives you enhanced protection from your government under all circumstances; if you choose to put yourself in a kinetic theater of operations then it doesn't act as a bullet proof vest.
In the case of Al-Awlaki, his due process was people in the executive branch (specifically the National Security Council) looking at the fact that he was running around on battlefields with people the US was fighting with, and deciding that he'd chosen to become an enemy combatant. You can certainly critique the general conduct of war by states, and whether the US should be engaged in asymmetric wars in general or in that theater in particular, but I am no more or less exercised about al-Awlaki's death than I am about any of his Yemeni/Al Qaeda associates that were blown up at the same time.
Put another way, if you were OK with them being killed, then you should be OK with him being killed because he chose to affiliate with them. If you're not OK with it, then I'd say the problem is the War on Terror as a whole, since it effectively functions as a blank check to target any group that can be designated as a military threat.
> In fairness, can you name a time in WW2 where the US government intentionally killed US citizens without regard to due process?
Not off the top of my head, but the Supreme Court decision in Ex Parte Quirin, From WWII, makes entirely clear that enemy combatants who are US citizens are not entitled to special treatment as compared to enemy combatants who are not citizens.
> There is supposed to be a strict separation of never using the military against the citizens of the united states
There is no legal or historical basis for this claim; in fact, the Constitution explicitly envisions the use of military force to suppress insurrection, which is ordinarily carried out by civilians; it is clearly intended that the government not act extrajudicially against persons (not just civilians) within the jurisdiction of the US when access to the civilians justice system is available, but enemy combatants, regardless of citizenship, at least when outside the practical reach of the US civilian justice system, don't seem to have any protection from the application of military power at any time in history.
Most of the people targeted, individually or generally, by the US military in the Civil War were US citizens, for instance.
Japanese internment camps? I’m sure at that scale people died that would not have.
Next given the scale of wwii I’m sure there were us citizens fighting for the axis powers. The main difference is we lacked the ability to track, research, and target individuals like we do today.
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.
Well that's the whole problem with the War on Terror, isn't it - the designation of who's an enemy is rather unilateral. At least in Al-Awlaki's case he was advertising his ultra-militant intentions about as clearly as possible.
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.
Exactly. Again, I will use Switzerland as an example and give a few typical salaries:
Banker in Zurich with 10y experience: 12k USD/M
Engineer in Zurich with 0y experience: 8k USD/M
so far it probably sounds pretty normal for people used to SF / NY levels right?
Here's the difference:
Mc Donald's cashier in Zurich: ~3500 USD/M
Median Salary in Zurich: ~6000 USD/M
Median Salary across Switzerland: ~5600 USD/M
These give you the low and mid points of the salary spectrum. It's just much more compressed than in the US - this Patagonia jacket should be <10% of anyone's monthly salary, probably affordable for >90% of population. If it isn't, then it would be if you take social services into account that are designed to correct for such market mistakes that leave people behind in poverty.
And this is Switzerland, mind you, probably the most US-like libertarian and decentrally governed place in Europe. All of this would be affordable to Americans if your government wouldn't just pander to the big corporations and throw out money by the boatloads for insanely overpriced defence contracts.
Switzerland is a small country benefitting from being the hub of a disproportional amount of global banking and commodity trading. I think that props up the minimum wage at McDonalds. That being said, the pride that the Swiss - from a McDonald’s worker to bus driver - show in their jobs is noticeable to this American.
Banking revenue is 7-9% of Swiss GDP, on par with many industrial nations. Commoditie Trades are disproportionate to Switzerland’s size for sure, but I fail to see how that translates to salaries in McDonalds - their main target market is hardly bankers and commodity traders. I think it has much more to do with the social safety net which imposes an implicit minimal wage (companies have to offer something significantly above what one can get from the government).
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.
I certainly agree that 300$ USD should be completely reasonable for something that lasts half a decade, I'm just not sure how to get from here to there realistically (well in the 5-10 year short term).
...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.
...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.
It’s a bit less clear if you’re a kid mining cobalt in the DRC
Worldwide incomes have risen more in the last 30 years, especially for the poor, than at any other time in history.
Tech might not have improved the lives of people who lost their jobs to “gig” workers who are paid a fraction of minimum wage.
This is mostly a myth. Gig workers tend to make a bit more than minimum wage. Which, sure, isn't great but these are unskilled jobs where you make your own hours. It's not surprising that the wages tend to be on the low side.
Tech has downright hurt the environment, even if you only look at sheer waste.
GDP per unit of energy consumed has risen dramatically due to better technology.
You probably don’t appreciate the future of drones I’d your experience with them is being bombed by them.
Deaths due to warfare are at all time historic lows. I can't say that this is due to new technology but it is worth noting.
I'm not sure why you switched to worldwide when it specifically said DRC. Most economic indicators there have been flat or declining for the last 50 years. Vague platitudes about the world as a whole are unhelpful, and if anything only serve to reinforce the mythology of universal progress.
gotta buy that shit they're selling now that WORLD TRADE is here. thank goodness for foreign products instead of whatever came before that.
> GDP per unit of energy consumed
using this metric presumes that GDP is the goal. fortunately or not, there's no quantitative measure of well-being. certainly we could suggest that not dying during childbirth is an improvement... but if you're instead spending life under the thumb of an extraction economy established by colonialists with the explicit intent to remote-rule thru division[0], then... well, it's at least not so crystal clear that foreign tech comes from the hand of the savior.
> Deaths due to warfare are at all time historic lows.
I like this statistic, too, but I suspect it's inflated by medics around battlefields not letting people bleed, or rot from infection, to death.
anyway, I just wanted to make the point that it's not so clear cut. I think technology is largely good... and whatever it is, it's not going away.
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.
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. Homicides/lynchings were common before modern tech, as an easy example.
Similarly, suicides are not only not a new phenomenon, but they are actually not as high as they have ever been historically. This is precisely what i meant by us having a higher bar. And we should continue to raise the bar. But don't talk about how tech could possibly make our lives better. Instead, lets continue the progress we have made.
"Bad things happened before" isn't really a rebuttal. The point of the original article was that tech can improve the outcomes of those things, but it's not, because we're not demanding it.
Worse things happened before, is the rebuttal. We are getting better. To the point that we now hold ourselves to standards we didn't even imagine before.
yet our stories of their past don't include any history before colonial forces, slave capture, or the faintest possibility that anything other than improvement could have come with the civilizing forces.
What? Even without the conquests of societies in the past, most other societies were much less likely to survive nature. A simple walk through the forest before antibiotics was ridiculously risky.
Again, the claim is that the bar is rising. Not that it always rose fairly. Nor that it has equally reached everyone. Just that, by and large, technology has made our lives better.
I mistakenly thought your double-grand-parent was related... so my comment is without context.
yeah, "tech" is changing things and I couldn't imagine life without it... I imagine there are beings on the planet that can't imagine life with it, and they seem to live fine lives.
we're special animals... in that technology is part of "us". but I don't know that makes our lives better.
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.
Despite the incredible destructive weaponry we can deploy today, the last half-century has been the least bloody in history. Technology has drastically improved both our ability to create and destroy, but fortunately we're doing more of the former.
Past performance does not guarantee future returns. One could say something similar about the 50 year period ending in 1910. WWI, WWII, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot really skew the average.
Let me argue that the only reason for this is the atomic bomb and not 'technological progress' as a whole. Technology's 'ability to create' has virtually no bearing on any of this in my opinion.
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.
> the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers
Still thanks to technology (e.g. radio, satellite, improved espionage capabilities).
> Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars
Once again, thanks to technology. We're now able to do more for less, and many of the motivations for war (resources, land) are no longer as much as a contributing factor.
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.
Some feedback: the way you present your arguments is not useful or productive to discussion.
This has nothing to do with whether I agree or disagree with your premise. It's the delivery of the message that you need to improve if you want it to come across in a way that is productive.
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.
They unfortunately publish a lot of useless filler nowadays, but it's pretty easy to skip past that, and they still seem to do real journalism on a regular basis. Are they really worth less than $0?
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.
