Slashdot Mirror

Why would anybody think that the leaders of the National Socialists or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were socialists?

Why, that's preposterous!

http://hawaii.edu/powerkills

US foreign policy is what's happening in Yemen. So, uh, obviously?

The trick for many of these societies will be to depose their authoritarian oppressors before they get strong AI assistance. It will be a survival-level trait for those that evolve it. Bombmakers have poor sales during peacetime, so this trick is to not focus on the bombmakers but those who can declare war, on outsiders or their own citizens.

http://hawaii.edu/powerkills

Our educational system has done a good job teaching our own people that Western culture is the worst that the world has ever produced. It's not. Go and check the actual figures for the 20th Century. Most are by China (PRC), Russia, Japan, China (KMT), Cambodia, and other non-Western cultures. Who remembers the Indonesian genocide? The Pakistani genocide of 1971? Nobody, because it doesn't serve the political purpose of convincing people that the West is the worst.

To start with the obvious, IANAA(stronomer).

However, looking at the object's trajectory I find it interesting that it passes so close to the sun - almost as if it was targeted this way.

Of course, if it had passed too far from the sun, we wouldn't have seen it at all. Still, I'd expect interstellar objects within say the orbit of Jupiter to be noticed. However, Oumuamua's closest approach to the sun (at 38,100,000 km) hit a circle less than 1/400 of the area of Jupiter's orbit. It does seem a bit weird to me for the first interstellar object ever observed to get so close to the sun by random chance.

For an interstellar ship, there are however good reasons to pass so close to a star - for example, to use its gravity for an assist, or maybe recharge its batteries.

Agreed that habitat loss is not the problem in these studies, as they are going to heavily forested areas to look at trends. Germany is showing 76% flying insect loss in German nature preserves?!?! They have a ton of forests, 32% of Germany is covered in forest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Anecdotally, from 30 years back to today we have I'd estimate about 1/20 the amount of bees in the three forested areas I frequent in my state (relatives live in the sticks). Butterflies are less than half. Mosquitoes are probably 1/5 of what they used to be. There are no new roads or change in human population in these areas... I assumed it was mostly pesticides that get sprayed for mosquitoes... but is it something more insidious? They aren't spraying to kill bugs in German forests or in Puerto Rico rain forests. This has me worried. If the insects die out, we are screwed. Insects and other arthropods by biomass, make up way more than say the billions of us big humans. They outweigh us easily... we are estimated at about 0.06 their mass. If that declines to 1/4 of what it used to be, shit is going to get messed up.

Number of species per organism category:
https://manoa.hawaii.edu/seale...

The biomass distribution on Earth graphic:
http://www.pnas.org/content/pn...

The biomass distribution on Earth:
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

We're also talking about the Russia, the stepchild of the USSR. You know, the left wing country that murdered > 60m people killed by their own country. If civilian power supplies go out and people die, so what? (Oh, yes, before the left wing shills start whining that my numbers aren't accurate, here's where they came from: https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/... . Don't start telling me that HAWAII is a right wing US state, please)

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki...

Solar at Hawaii's location [nrel.gov] (96704 zip code) has a capacity factor of about 0.124 (this takes into account night, seasons, movement of the sun, weather, maintenance, etc).

Of course, when you intentionally pick one of the worst places on the island, naturally you get such a mediocre result.

Looks like the best place is right on top of the volcano. Obviously we should pick that.

Solar at Hawaii's location [nrel.gov] (96704 zip code) has a capacity factor of about 0.124 (this takes into account night, seasons, movement of the sun, weather, maintenance, etc).

Of course, when you intentionally pick one of the worst places on the island, naturally you get such a mediocre result.

Well, it is interesting that this directly contradicts a few other recent papers, which say pretty much the opposite.

Like this one.

Hmmm... and this one.

Let's not forget this one.

And this one...

And so on, and so on.

The right seems to like to do that. Left seems to say, let people do what they want, leave people alone.

You joking? The side that invented social justice wants to leave people alone? You're nuts. Did you know that back in the 90's we didn't have SJWs and it wasn't exactly the third reich, right?

Lastly, is the rights apparent 'fear' of government.

You know what killed more people than anything else in the 20th century? Government. Powerful central governments. Apparently when you give them enough power they just go off on their own and ignore the people's interests in favor of their own. And their own interests require that a lot of people die so that they can achieve their goals. Just look at these numbers - when you start using terms like "deka-megamurderer" it's amazingly frightening. People are right to be afraid, and you are the one that is uneducated on the topic. Did you even know the Nationalist Chinese killed more people than Hitler killed Jews? If not, then how are you qualified to even speak on the subject of fear of powerful government?

There's an old conservative maxim: "Keep the old as long as it is good, and take the new as soon as it is better." In the political context, liberals dismiss that maxim. They propose radical changes in public policy, without any caution...often in the face of copious evidence that their proposals have been tried and found harmful!

If one side understands the other better, and by extension probably their arguments better too, and still holds their position...that speaks to the strength of their position. The Left simply does not understand the Right and doesn't care to - much like you say anyone on the Right must be an uneducated deplorable prson. When faced with questions such as "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal" or "Justice is the most important requirement for a society," liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree.

"I feel that man-hating is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class hatred against the class that is oppressing them."
-- Robin Morgan, influential feminist

Progressives: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil...

"Earth" slows asteroids down when they land on it. To rest, in the Earth's rest frame, in reasonable approximation. This is a completely inelastic collision, and given the disparity in their masses nearly all of the asteroid's relative kinetic energy is transformed into heat. Some of that heat heats the atmosphere as the atmosphere lands, sure, but seriously, look at the magnitudes involved. This is pretty much irrelevant, given that the impact is going to blow the friction-heated atmosphere near the impact point clean off of the planet.

As far as the second part of your question is concerned, yes, energy is conserved, so the minimum speed of an asteroid falling unimpeded from a place very far from Earth is also the minimum speed required to throw it back up to that place.

This isn't that radical an idea, after all. It works just fine for baseballs. If you drop a baseball in a vaccuum so that it falls some distance H, it will arrive with a speed of roughly \sqrt{2 g H} in near-Earth gravity g. If you want to throw it so that it rises to a maximum height H, you have to throw it up with speed \sqrt{2 g H}. This is simple algebra:

E_tot = U = mgH = 1/2 m v^2 = K

Solve for v. The solution doesn't care if v is directed up or down -- both are consistent with it having EITHER started at H and fallen to 0 (v negative or down) or started at 0 and risen to H (v positive or up). Or you can do the simple solution to Newton's second law and get there a bit harder from:

Falling: y(t) = H - 1/2 g t^2 and v(t) = - g t
vs
Rising: y(t) = v_0 t - 1/2 g t^2 and v(t) = v_0 - gt

If you solve the first for v when it hits the ground, you'll get \sqrt{2 g H}. If you use v_0 = \sqrt{2 g H} in the second one, it will rise precisely to height H and stop.

But seriously, all of this is in any introductory physics textbook, including mine. Look, here's a nice little lecture on this. Note especially slide 6. Yes, escape speed is also drop from infinity from rest speed when considering two bodies, and at the intro level that's all one teaches. But the energy concepts work just fine for whole solar systems, even when solving the dynamics problems involved becomes nearly impossible for long times:

http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/~mo...

Otherwise, find a physics textbook. Mine is online and free, and if you google up answers you are as likely as not to get directed to it just because there aren't many free competitors, but I promise, it is accurate enough and fairly complete (except where there are, no doubt, little errors or missing stuff -- an online textbook is never quite finished, sigh:-). But if you prefer Tipler and Mosca, or Halliday, Resnick and Walker or Serway and Jewett or Young and Freedman (old Sears and Zemansky) or Giancoli or Knight (I'm just reading off the authors of the stacks of the damn things in my office) IT DOESN'T MATTER. Look, I'm an expert on this. No kidding. Not expert at the level of a cosmologist maybe, but at the intro level it just isn't that difficult, and on a good day I can actually solve Newton's Law of Gravitation in Newton's Second Law and show that planets really DO move in elliptical orbits, which is a notch or two past intro. So just as a very elastic ball, dropped from a height, will bounce back up to almost the same height (difference lost to heat and sound during the bounce), so a comet that comes into the sun and passes some distance away from the sun at some speed will have the SAME speed as it departs from the sun at that distance on the far side.

Abstract of the original article: https://www.nature.com/nclimat...
Press release from Nature East Asia: http://www.natureasia.com/en/r...
Press release from U. Hawaii Manoa (the institution of the lead authors): http://www.hawaii.edu/news/201...
Article at phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-...
Article at Science Daily: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...

Interactive map of number of deadly heat days: https://maps.esri.com/globalri...

Nah, the lesson here is that it's IMPOSSIBLE to keep government and economics as separate as possible, and that trying to keep them away is not a sustainable solution.

You're right - when you allow a government, they stick their 'fingers' into business, every time, guaranteed. And when you give the psychopaths "government" power, you get 300 million dead in just a hundred years.

I'm not claiming I know a better solution. I'm just saying we need to find a better solution.

If 300 million dead isn't going to teach humanity that government is the most deadly creation humans have ever divised, I'm not sure that anything can. Masses of ignorant people will still claim that we need a government system to keep us safe from "the anarchists" (who are meanwhile busy selling shoes and cryptocurrencies) and that we just need to "vote harder" until the killing stops. They apparently took both history and mathematics in a government school.

I still think Bill Gates is a dick, but I'd put up with his crappy business practices over Stalin's any day. Nobody is going to vote to allow Bill Gates to have nukes. Because without the blinder of politics they realize that would be an incredibly stupid move.

Wrong again snowflake!

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki...

Why are you a progressive? Seriously.

I suggest you spend some time reading history:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I might as well start submitting DistroWatch updates:


Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 18 "KDE", an edition of the Mint family featuring the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 18 'Sarah' KDE edition. Linux Mint 18 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. This edition of Linux Mint features the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment. The default display manager is SDDM. The APT sources include the Kubuntu backports PPA, which provides updates to newer versions of the Plasma desktop. The update manager received many improvements, both visual and under the hood. The main screen and the preferences screen now use stack widgets and subtle animations, and better support was given to alternative themes." Here is the brief release announcement, with further details, screenshots and videos provided in the new features page as well as the release notes. Download: linuxmint-18-kde-64bit.iso (1,622MB, SHA256, signature, torrent).

I might as well start submitting DistroWatch updates:


Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 18 "KDE", an edition of the Mint family featuring the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 18 'Sarah' KDE edition. Linux Mint 18 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. This edition of Linux Mint features the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment. The default display manager is SDDM. The APT sources include the Kubuntu backports PPA, which provides updates to newer versions of the Plasma desktop. The update manager received many improvements, both visual and under the hood. The main screen and the preferences screen now use stack widgets and subtle animations, and better support was given to alternative themes." Here is the brief release announcement, with further details, screenshots and videos provided in the new features page as well as the release notes. Download: linuxmint-18-kde-64bit.iso (1,622MB, SHA256, signature, torrent).

I might as well start submitting DistroWatch updates:


Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 18 "KDE", an edition of the Mint family featuring the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 18 'Sarah' KDE edition. Linux Mint 18 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. This edition of Linux Mint features the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment. The default display manager is SDDM. The APT sources include the Kubuntu backports PPA, which provides updates to newer versions of the Plasma desktop. The update manager received many improvements, both visual and under the hood. The main screen and the preferences screen now use stack widgets and subtle animations, and better support was given to alternative themes." Here is the brief release announcement, with further details, screenshots and videos provided in the new features page as well as the release notes. Download: linuxmint-18-kde-64bit.iso (1,622MB, SHA256, signature, torrent).

100 million dead can't be wrong

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki...

Let's try it again! The world has 7 billion people to and we can spare another 100 million, right? Surely all the decades of forced ideology by dozens of countries just weren't done the /right/ way. With the patented new and improved right way we can do it right this time. This time we'll do it with 1/3rd fewer dead people!!! /zombie apocalypse //one guaranteed way to make communism work

NZ should pass a law or Constitutional amendment mandating that the public have access rights to all beaches. That's how it's done in Hawaii.

More details (with animated gif) here: http://cfht.hawaii.edu/en/news...
(include measurements in SI units)

Given that muscles and nerves operate by small electric signals it isn't much of a leap to see how an animal could evolve a mechanism to detect an induced current when it's in a magnetic field. Pretty much the same as any of our other senses (vision, sound, touch, taste - all just stimulation of nerves).

It's well known that sharks can navigate and find prey by detecting magnetic fields. No doubt it took a few hundred million generations of natural selection to fine tune the mechanism, but sharks have been around for a long, long, time.

People vastly overestimate how infallible people are (especially themselves). The rate at which humans make errors is about 0.5%. Which if you think about all the things you do in the course of a day, is a really big number.

About 7.3% of the population were hospitalized overnight or longer (23 million people).

If 250,000 of them died, then fatality rate due to medical errors is about 1.1%. Which is in line with the average error rate compounded over multiple ways in which errors could kill a hospital patient.

If you want to reduce the fatality rate, you either need to get people out of the system (e.g. autonomous cars - but they make people uncomfortable even though they're statistically safer), or implement automated checks to supplement people's work. We're already doing the latter with prescriptions - computers now automatically check for dangerous interactions between medications prescribed to the same person. More operating rooms scan all equipment used during surgery, and re-scans at the end to make sure it's all accounted for, and nothing has accidentally been left inside the patient. And some hospitals are starting to use barcode and RFID scanners to double-check that the medication being administered is the proper one for that particular patient.

This bill is dangerous Stalinist, Maoist police-state Stasi rubbish. The rich and entitled and powerful can't stand the idea the plebeian serfs have cash money, firearms and privacy. All governments, particularly ones who commit mass democide, take away all 3 every time. Cash money, firearms, privacy. Once this is gone all things are under government control.

40% of Trump voters are in favor of bombing the Kingdom of Agrabah. A third of Republicans overall. A fifth of Democrats. Agrabah is the fictional setting of Disney's Aladdin.

While the governments we have now are based on horses and pidgeons, in terms of technology, and are totally obsolete, putting people directly into power never works. Putting representatives into power never works either. Power kills.

Work to replace these ancient barbaric systems, not augment them.

"Hawaiian culture was stone age before the white man arrived"

Yes, so stone age that they travelled about 4,000 kilometres from the Society Islands and did that in sufficient numbers that they settled in Hawaii.

Discovery and Settlement of Polynesia
... The Polynesian migration to Hawai‘i was part of one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity: the discovery and settlement of the remote, widely scattered islands of the central Pacific. The migration began before the birth of Christ. While Europeans were sailing close to the coastlines of continents before developing navigational instruments that would allow them to venture onto the open ocean, voyagers from Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa began to settle islands in an ocean area of over 10 million square miles. The settlement took a thousand years to complete and involved finding and fixing in mind the position of islands, sometimes less than a mile in diameter on which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By the time European explorers entered the Pacific Ocean in the 16th century almost all the habitable islands had been settled for hundreds of years.
The voyaging was all the more remarkable in that it was done in canoes built with tools of stone, bone, and coral. The canoes were navigated without instruments by expert seafarers who depended on their observations of the ocean and sky and traditional knowledge of the patterns of nature for clues to the direction and location of islands.

GP is right. Hitler was a failed painter before his circumstances changed. Give Trump some power and he'll vigorously exercise it without a second thought - all while considering himself virtuous for doing so.

http://hawaii.edu/powerkills

And the Polynesian Islands were populated before Europe had boats.

No, they weren't.

"Polynesian ancestors settled in Samoa around 800 BC, colonized the central Society Islands between AD 1025 and 1120 and dispersed to New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui and other locations between AD 1190 and 1290."
http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/ike/...

Your Eurocentric view is blocking you from seeing that explorers predate Columbus and made ocean crossings long before

Yes, that part is right.

The rocket was in fact carrying satellites -- a large primary payload (HawaiiSat-1), and a number of small CubeSats.

http://www.hsfl.hawaii.edu/wor...

The SuperStrypi is an evolved variant of a spin-stabilized 1960s sounding rocket, so the axial spin is expected, though the anomaly that ultimately doomed the mission was not!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Disclaimer: I helped port some code to run on the system board of one the CubeSats. Let's just say it was a disappointing afternoon....

But apart from the aqueduct, roads, public health, sanitation, peace, public order, education, and healthcare

Yes, those are things that nobody would demand in a market situation. Clearly we need human sacrifice on the order of hundreds of millions of people to provide water transportation systems.

"But if we don't sacrifice the virgins, the sun won't come up, and then everybody will die!"

I'm not sure which is the most repulsive: the Stockholm syndrome, the lack of reason and creativity, or the sociopathic disregard for the lives of millions in deference to the propaganda of a seventh-grade government-school civics teacher.

"You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of reality."

Sorry, even in a discussion overrun with nationalistic idiots you're fucking reaching beyond the bounds of credibility.

a - what the fuck does the US have to do with whether Putin has blood on his hands
b - when the fuck would US 'murderous foreign politics' in any way remotely justify Putin's behaviour
c - how the fuck is US or Russian activity prior to Putin taking power relevant to this conversation
d - why the fuck would you use 'murderous foreign politics' to describe the US without using identical language to Russia
e - I can't find any reliable figures for foreign policy related deaths from either the US or the USSR/Russia, but take a peek at this: https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki...

The USSR isn't looking too healthy a place to live from '46 to '87; that's more deaths than the whole Korean war, Vietnam, the Gulf war and the invasion of Iraq combined, and America was only one of multiple nations involved in those major conflicts.

Do you have any evidence at all to back up your claim of "The number dwarves in comparison" or are you as big a fuckwit as your posts suggests?

Could this technology be used to detect nuclear submarines ?

To some degree yes. The question is with what directional precision and at a useful range? The problem with nuclear submarines on patrol is being able to tell exactly where they are in near real time ("localizing"), otherwise the information is not of great use.

Here is a paper that discusses the potential of a gigantic world-wide neutrino detection system. It states:

A 100 MWt marine reactor would contribute about one sigma to the world total nue-bar count rate at 1000 km range in two days and would thus be marginally detectable. At 100 km range however it would be easily detectable and if the array is distributed over some distance on the ocean bottom the signals might be used to roughly track the submarine but not with great precision nor in real time. The tracking accuracy should not enough to cause worry to military planners concerned with destabilizing exposure of submarines to attack.

An SLBM submarine on patrol would not be operating at anything like 100 MW, it would be much lower.

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki...

The rate per population is even lower than the graph implies due to the tripling of the population over the time scale

Progressivism is another name for Marxist Communism.

Take a look at some of this "data": http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil...

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki...

Death by communism. Somehow I think if we hadn't been doing things to move the world forward things would have been much worse.

Really is there any point in history, that you can look at and say the world would be better off if you could have erased America ?

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki...

My definition of peace is based on war being a cause of death.

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki...

Deaths from wars and other state violence are at historic lows.

But really foam at the mouth more.

Fauxahantus and a Communist? You people are batshit crazy!

History much? http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil...

...

I think it comes down to this: why there is a big cold spot in the CMB? Because there's a big void. Mystery solved!

Except there's still the mystery of why there is such a big void in the first place.

That is true, but it is a much lesser mystery. The previous record-holder was the Canes Venatici Supervoid at 1.3 billion light years, and an Eridanus Supervoid has been the preferred explanation for the Eridanus Cold Spot (or, humorously, CAOE: "Cosmic Axis Of Evil) for years ("parallel universe collisions" was always an exotic explanation), but the existence of such a supervoid had not been confirmed. Dr. István Szapudi of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has has just announced findings that measures this supervoid at 1.8 billion light years. This is moderately bigger than the previous record-holder (40% wider), but there are quite a few that are 400-800 million light years across. This looks rather like a power law distribution, often found in nature.

The Canes Venatici Supervoid is closer as than the Eridanus Supervoid (red shift z=0.118 vs 0.22, or 1.5 vs 2.5 billion light years) as well as being smaller so there are two reasons for the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect to be weaker, but apparently there is no anomalous cooling for that void at all. I would like to see someone address that.

Only complaint I have, I really wish most of these telescopes were open to the public. I have never had the opportunity to look through anything bigger than a backyard telescope and it would be amazing to be able to see what a thirty meter telescope can do.

The big telescopes on top of Mauna Kea aren't exactly backyard efforts - they're more akin to giant multispectral digital cameras. I'd be surprised if there are any optical paths suitable for a conventional viewfinder - you're really not going to 'look through' one of these beasts.

You can get to see inside some of them, though - there are escorted summit tours with guides giving loads of information on what astronomers are doing up there, along with access to 'at least one' of the observatories. I went on such a tour a few years ago, and got to see inside one of the twin Keck telescopes. Bloody incredible.

It's really quite alien up there, with not much air. The tour required us to stay at the ~3km altitude visitor centre for an hour or two to help us acclimatise - we got to watch a video on the construction of the telescopes, and on quite how and why the mountain was so important to the native Hawaiians. After that, it was off to the summit - SUV mountaineering, we dubbed it.

I live in Hawaii and am excited for the new 30 meter telescope. There are currently 13 telescopes at the summit of Mauna Kea.
https://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/mko...
This project has been in the works for 7 years, The local population that is against the building of this telescope has had that long to protest, but didn't actually start protesting until the project was already underway.
From what I hear on my Facebook feed from my Hawaiian friends is that they oppose the building of this new telescope because they consider Mauna kea a sacred place, as well as the sheer size of this new telescope.
The summit is sacred to ancient Hawaiians, so much that a kapu (Ancient Hawaiian law) was made that only important tribal chiefs were allowed up at the summit. (Breaking Kapu usually meant death).
So in old Hawaii only a select few were allowed up on the volcano. I don't know why anyone is complaining. in new Hawaii anyone can visit the summit and see the majestic views of the island as well as some amazing star-gazing at night.
I don't speak up on Facebook even though many of my friends are asking me to sign a petition to stop the building of the telescope as well as protesting locally (I am on Maui). Its hard since most of my friends are not very techy or interested much in science. I keep my mouth shut since I fear I will be ostracized for speaking my true opinion.
Only complaint I have, I really wish most of these telescopes were open to the public. I have never had the opportunity to look through anything bigger than a backyard telescope and it would be amazing to be able to see what a thirty meter telescope can do.

Well, "Learned" is absolutely a cute name for a professor.

I'll see you and raise.

Well, "Learned" is absolutely a cute name for a professor.

people claiming you are impeding on their constitutional right to overthrow the government.

I really, really, wish I was exaggerating or kidding on this one.

I really wish you weren't wishing that. It shows you haven't read your history.

Pass thanks. Buh bye.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil...

Do you let them say no to the insulin?

Is it, in the end, the outcomes that really matter? That we should have a government force them to act because the outcome would be better?

The idea of putting governments in charge killed 350 million people in just the last century alone, most of the deaths not being from war but governments killing their own people. Parents of Type I diabetics give their kids insulin > 99.9% of the time - there's not much a regime of forced medication can do in comparison to the damage just allowing governments is demonstrated to do.

Do you still say yes to their existence?

Watch out, the "ends justify the means" crowd will be here shortly talking about how magnificent the pyramids are and how long they have lasted.

The graveyards of bodies are a small price to pay for such greatness!

Hell, if people could actually trust each other, we wouldn't *need* nation states in the first place.

Nation states killed 350 million people in the last century alone.

The onus is on nation states' defenders to show that neighborly spats and other small disputes would do worse than that. It's not like private conflict-resolution services don't already exist (and are always preferred in business contracts). Every lack-of-imagination excuse people have for "needing" nation states must be justified vis-a-vis the demonstrated body count (and that's only taking the utilitarian stance, not even the moral one).

If somebody showed up today promising peace in exchange for executing a tenth of the world's population, they'd be locked up in the psychopath ward and the religious people would call him an antichrist.