To be fair, none of those 180 people, if they had lived, would have cared if I died.
150,000 people die each day, of whom 50,000 die of causes not labelled as “age related causes”. If I died in a non-newsworthy way, nobody outside my own corner of global society would know about it; the fact that some random individuals you don’t know happen to have died in a slightly more newsworthy way today probably shouldn’t change how you feel about them, versus the other 50,000 or so premature deaths for the day.
You could well be right, maybe Iran’s air defences are on a par with Syria’s.
I’ve suddenly realised something important — I’m commenting on important issues based on nothing but information gleaned from probably equally ignorant comments posted somewhere else. Why the heck am I doing this? I’m no expert on Iranian military capabilities.
Why do we all feel compelled to pollute the Internet with our ill-informed speculation on important issues?
I feel like I should just quit commenting on anything outside the narrow areas in which I’m a proper expert, and so should everyone else.
If casualties are zero, we can laugh it off as an impotent hissy fit by an incompetent adversary.
If casualties are non-zero, the President will be obliged to carry out his “52 targets” threat. This is probably the right move — don’t play tit-for-tat against a less powerful adversary, instead immediately escalate to a level they can’t possibly match.
Unfortunately Iran’s air defences are more potent than anyone the US has bombed recently, so we might be about to find out just how good US technology really is.
What happens next? I’m not sure. I can’t imagine the US committing to a ground invasion of Iran, but it should be possible with an air campaign to reduce Iran to the level of a 2000-era Iraq.
Edit: President Trump’s latest “all is well” tweet, and his intention to hold off on doing a briefing until tomorrow, seems to imply that US casualties were zero after all and that he’s chosen the “laugh it off” response, which is a great relief to me.
As always, thinking about flat Earthism is a terrible exercise for your brain. The fact that a few people exist who are utterly and obviously wrong about something, and that you’re not among them, should not encourage you to think that you’re probably right about any other issue.
Basically, I think an irrational tendency towards “both sides have a point” is a lot better than an irrational tendency towards “my side is right”, and that humans tend to err in the latter way about ten thousand times more often than they err in the former.
Counteranecdote: I made a fake account for work purposes (needed to look at certain things on Facebook that you can only see while logged in, and didn’t want to use my personal account) and it got deleted pretty quickly.
Given that most Chinese know perfectly well that theyand their families will wind up dead or in a concentration camp if they express dissent, in what way is it useful to ask them what they think?
Money terrible spent, just another billion poured down the drain on inefficient renewable energy technologies that would have been much better spent developing better technologies.
For a billion dollars you could hire five hundred brilliant (or at least clever) scientists and pay then each $200K pa for ten years to work on promising technologies in photovoltaics, ranging from sexy stuff like multiple exciton generation to prosaic stuff like how to make silicon sheets cheaper.
What’s really odd is that this is an article at all.
In a world where billions of things happen every day, how does a garden-variety franchisee contract dispute in Japan become an article in the New York Times?
Investment idea: build a bunch of projectors that fool orbiting satellites into reading empty parking lots as full, then short retailers’ stocks at earnings time, knowing that all the big smart money will be on the other side.
If this were really true, you’d expect to see most people with full freedom to set their own hours gravitate towards that 30-hour mark.
Professors working 30-hour weeks would write more papers than their harder-working colleagues. Business owners would show up for 30 hours a week and go home. Fruit pickers, paid by the bucket, would pick more fruit in 30 hours than their colleagues could pick in 50. Professional athletes who spent less time training would beat their harder-working competitors.
Do you have any proposed mechanism for how Australia’s coal production would lead to increased property losses, aside from the very marginal effect of Australia’s coal production on global warming multiplied by the very marginal effect of global warming on bushfires?
150,000 people die each day, of whom 50,000 die of causes not labelled as “age related causes”. If I died in a non-newsworthy way, nobody outside my own corner of global society would know about it; the fact that some random individuals you don’t know happen to have died in a slightly more newsworthy way today probably shouldn’t change how you feel about them, versus the other 50,000 or so premature deaths for the day.