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.
Those bases house American, allied/coalition and Iraqi soldiers. The US forces will respond regardless what the casualty count looks like. Something like that even if they missed can’t be ignored.
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.
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.
My wife tried to create a new FB account a month ago after many years of not having one. Entirely genuine, real name, photo and cell phone number. Rejected as deemed to be fake.
You mean like how this year is the latest in a long run of parts of the country breaking temperature records year round, as well the general uptick in mean-surface temperature since 1950 - http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/aus/2018/#tabs=... ?
Or that we're in one of the longest droughts on record, with many rural towns prior to this (and still actively) running out of water (as in, no water in the pipes at all), and Sydney on water-restrictions?
Mysteriously, Australia has been having a multi-decadal run of consistently seeing the factors which would be worsened by global warming, get worse.
Droughts are getting worse because of climate change (and of course in Australia droughts make bushfires worse because there is more dry scrub, and hazard reduction burns are too dangerous to do).
Hey gd1, your comment is dead so I can't reply. But here is your BOM citation (it also has your requested timeseries data):
Australia's driest year on record
Nationally-averaged rainfall 40% below average for the year at 277.6 mm
The national total rainfall for 2019 was 40% below the 1961–1990 average at 277.6 mm (the 1961–1990 average is 465.2 mm). This makes 2019 the driest year in the 119 years since 1900.
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.
money spent isn't money burned--it paid people's salaries, it helped people gain skill and experience that will apply to future projects, and the total economic benefit (not just in dollars, but in capabilities and human capital), is a much broader picture than this one power plant and its dollar per mwh number.
That sort of napkin math doesn’t take into account any economic or political realities, not to mention a stack of research papers generates 0Mwh.
When this plant was being engineered, many projected pricing trends for photovoltaics would have still kept it economical today. In that time China heavily increased their subsidizing of that sector which has been the overwhelming cause for pushing pricing down and is still the case today.
If things played out differently, which could have easily been the case, this would have been a good solution. I think it’s wise to diversify your bets across a number of solutions when you’re implementing a state level program and you should count on some of them being bad ideas. Media will jump on the half dozen failures from dozens of successes which overall is a good ROI.
Unless all the scientists do is theorectical work, you're going to need a lot more than that to pay for equipment, materials and other resources required to actually do some experiments, develop poc's etc.
The reason you are in the position to earn money and the poor person isn't, is luck.
No matter how you look at it. You had no influence on your genes, the culture you were born in, your upbringing and the socio economic status of your parents, how your genes were influenced by the environment and so on. All the little pieces that made you who you are, were outside of your control.
Now you can say "well I decided at some point to do this, and that is why I am successful." But there are lots of factors that let you into the position to make that decision.
If you had the same genes, the same upbringing and so on as a poor person, you would be poor as well. In fact you would be exactly that person.
We should be thankful for the systems that enabled us to achieve. From roads and a government that has made things relatively stable, and we should acknowledge the dark parts of our life that have helped tailor who we are. A lot of life is chance (your genes, where you were born, and to whome). However, I firmly believe that you are wrong in your last paragraph. You can argue determinism, but that is lazy. I escaped poverty and it was a lot of work. I chose to do that and I got lucky. It required both luck and hard work.
> However, I firmly believe that you are wrong in your last paragraph. You can argue determinism, but that is lazy. I escaped poverty and it was a lot of work. I chose to do that and I got lucky.
It doesn't need to be determinism. You have no control over random events as well. How exactly did you decide to chose the way you did? Why were you able to stick to the hard work part?
Of course you can assume some supernatural you that is able to make decisions for your brain. But there is no evidence for that. As far as we know, how the neurons are connected and how they interact with the rest of the environment determines all our longings and our decisions.
I find that Robert Sapolsky's "Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst" is a must read for anyone who wants a small glimpse on the topic of why humans are the way they are.
If i understood it correctly, your whole argument can be boiled down to “we have no free will, because all our decisions are influenced by a ton of factors outside of our control, thus making us not in control of anything.”
While this is debatable, it is not a useful lens to look at the world through. Why work out or study or attempt to do anything difficult and work on improving yourself to try and achieve something? If you dont feel motivated, it is all your brain chemistry and other factors outside of your control. Poor you, and lucky all those other people who worked hard and tried achieving something, too bad your brain chemistry and outside factors didn’t convince you to work on yourself and improve things. Nothing you can do about it, so why worry about it, right? /s
I am not trying to evoke the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” point, that’s not what i am trying to say at all. A lot of things in life are definitely due to luck and factors outside of our control. But a lot of things require both hard work and luck, with luck alone not being enough.
Think about it. Imagine you randomly meeting Elon Musk at a grocery store, and you got lucky, he decides to have a conversation with you while waiting in line (it is a far-fetched scenario, i know, but bear with me here). He asks what do you do and what you are into. If you worked hard in the field of aerospace engineering and made significant contributions, that conversation can easily turn into a job or learning something new and cool. If you didnt work hard (regardless of the field), then the conversation will prolly be about some surface level topic like the weather or tesla stuff, and you are left with nothing at the end.
Just working hard isn’t enough by itself, but it ensures that you are prepared to take the most advantage out of a lucky situation that could present itself.
A Thomas Jefferson’s quote comes to mind as relevant as well: “I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
If you are motivated by the belief that your efforts will make a significant long term beneficial difference to your life, go for it.
But what if it really isn't true? What if for each thing that appears to be obtained through your own effort, there are plenty of other random factors in your life that interact with your apparently-obtained gains and tend to cancel out the benefits by making something else worse?
Then you'd be labouring under a convincing illusion. One that probably can be examined by people interested in studying it.
If it could be studied, would you rather know the truth, or would you rather not even look, so you can stay motivated?
(Btw, I'm a fan of the quote as well. Above is written from a devil's advocate sort of approach.)
I find that reading behave gave me a new perspective on how to look at people that are less fortunate than me and how I think of "evil" people.
> While this is debatable, it is not a useful lens to look at the world through. Why work out or study or attempt to do anything difficult and work on improving yourself to try and achieve something?
Incentives and desires don't go away just because you came to the conclusion that free will as it is often used, does not exist.
I still have a desire to better myself and improve my life. I'm just clear that my ability to do that is the result of a cascade of events that I had no control over.
Everything that you own had been created within the support and context of society. Your food and water, the service that takes your waste away, the vehicle you drive, the vehicles that deliver your food and clothing, the roads, the maintenance of those roads, the products that you're using to post on this site . . . If it's against your will to contribute to these services, you can choose to live free of all of these societal abominations and live in the forest somewhere. But yes, society has a way of preventing freeloading.
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?
Because it helps one of the narratives they've been pushing for at least a decade: "business all bad, people being exploited, we are their/your champions", never mind any actual truth.
Mostly the standards of rigour in the field of psychology are deemed flimsy and a lot of findings have failed to replicate.
It's my understanding that Big Five has been replicated consistently across different languages and cultures over the last 90 years and is one of the only things we're fairly sure of in psychology at this point.
The accusation was that it was "unproven hogwash". That doesn't check out.
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.