The capture by the Royal Navy of not one but two Enigmas at sea in the course of the war was very important to the Battle of the Atlantic, and hence to the survival of the UK, but it surely had little effect on the outcome for the USA. I suggest that radar and rdf were actually as, if not more important, and that in those cases honours are even - the magnetron in the UK, and the work of the Rad Lab at MIT. In fact, in a bad attack of historical revisionism, the work of the Rad Lab may well have been far more important than the Manhattan Project. With complete air and sea superiority, an invasion of Japan was never necessary - the entire country could have been contained until it had no fighting assets left. The Bomb was just cheaper. But without radar, control of the Pacific and the Atlantic would have taken much, much longer.
My car doesn't have an ignition key; it has a software on-off switch. There is no guaranteed way of turning off the engine if the throttle sticks.
The only workable response in that hypothetical situation would be to move the control knob into neutral and apply both brakes. The engine management will prevent the engine from blowing up. If the clutch doesn't disengage, still apply both brakes with maximum force (anything else could destroy the brakes by pad wear.)
The truth is, we have absolutely no idea and the "Drake test" has too many unknowns to be of any use.
My own suspicion, which is at least supported by events so far, is that a single inhabitable planet does not contain sufficient energy resources to allow any intelligent form of life any significant way of getting off-planet. The energy consumption needed to get to a technological civilisation may be such that by the time the necessary engineering skills exists, an energy crisis has been reached the outcome of which is either population collapse or evolution to a state more like an ant community than anything else.
Once the ship hit the iceberg, large numbers of people would have died regardless of the radio technology available.
Very few non-military ships are capable of working anywhere in the world in all seasons. Some sailing ships are, nuclear icebreakers can. Any cruise liner has a maximum safe working map which varies from season to season, and then there are further restrictions like don't keep steaming at night where there is ice. By the time of the Titanic all these things were well known and understood. What seems to have happened, quite simply, is that for commercial reasons the owners instructed the captain to exceed the safe working envelope of the Titanic. There may have been contributory factors, like the question of whether the helm orders were the right way round (because steam practice was the reverse of sail practice). The failure of the wireless operator (thanks for the correction above) to recognise the seriousness of the warning from the Californian was a serious, and stupid, dereliction of ordinary duty of care, but the fact is that if one experienced captain thought it best to stop, another could have done so without the warning.
In short, it was a multicausal accident, but almost all the causes were well known.
I'm not sure of the relevance of Jutland. As far as I can see the principal lesson of Jutland was "Don't mix old and new ships in your battle fleets", and that had been amply demonstrated in earlier WW1 engagements.
Indeed, the Californian sent a warning before the collision and the Titanic's captain ignored it. The only real injustice was that the owners should have gone to prison for corporate manslaughter because they insisted on him sailing at night in icy waters. The Californian had stopped.
The root cause of the Titanic disaster was, in fact, free market capitalism. (The people who down-mod things they disagree with, instead of responding to them, may now proceed as usual.)
That was in a 15 year period. Now we need to know how many people in China would typically have died from the same causes in that period. This is exactly where proper data collection and analysis is needed - to what extent was the destruction caused by the wars responsible for the civilian deaths? Were there other factors (weather patterns, for instance) involved? Was China more fragile than the United States, so that a war in which fewer died directly had a much bigger knock on effect? What similarities and differences were there with the Cultural Revolution, with a similar death rate?
During the American wars with Britain, the Royal Navy had a well publicised policy of freeing captured slaves on American ships, thus encouraging them to mutiny on one hand, and making them very determined not to allow their new ships to fall into American hands on the other.
Straw man? I was responding to someone who objects to statistical analysis on the highly logical grounds that (s)he "dislikes" it and thinks it "inappropriate", and was trying to put the other side a bit.
I think it was Jay Gould (and if not I apologise to his shade) who observed that the usual distinction between "hard" and "soft" science is completely backward. Physics advanced faster than chemistry, and chemistry faster than biology, because in fact it is physics that is "not-hard", and especially the social sciences and economics that are very hard indeed. We had a model of dynamics that was "good enough" by 1700AD, but the causes of infectious diseases wouldn't be understood for roughly another 150 years. (We've just seen what happens when a load of bankers think physicists are capable of writing financial models).
However, as the originators of CERN would probably agree, because something is difficult is not a reason not to try it.
In my own experience, most of the people who object to statistical modeling do so because the results confound cherished beliefs. For instance, the arts graduates who run the British Home Office despise statistics because so many studies have shown that their approaches to crime don't work, and don't want to know about medical and psychological studies of the effects of various drugs because the results do not suit the agenda of the Daily Mail and the drinks companies. During WW2, the High Command of the RAF had a statistical wing that was demonstrating that (a) carpet bombing was a failure and (b) air crews did not become safer with experience. So what did they do? Ignored them, of course. But that is all the more reason why they should be done, and done as rigorously as possible.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion. But as the analysis did its best to allow for immigration and emigration, and did comparisons with other periods, your argument needs a bit more beef than "dislike". In my own field of interest, naval history, things like manning levels, pay rates, construction, weights of shot, water capacity, access to navigational equipment and the like turn out to be far better predictors of outcomes than the "Great Man" ideas of historians of the past. The outcome of the Battle of Britain was almost entirely determined by engineering factors - radar, and the fact that the British fighters were developed a little later than the German ones and so benefited from better engineering. The massacres in Rwanda and El Salvador can be better understood by analysing population density, land use and economic power than by speculation over tribal or political conflict. Proper statistical analysis of history - not numeric analysis, whatever that is - is not only illuminating in itself but could eventually give models with predictive power.
The native Americans, on your view, weren't Americans? And Vietnam and Iraq are not part of American history? Well, that's one way round it. Would you try to justify Hitler by arguing that the German Jews "weren't Germans" and that the destruction in Russia and Poland shouldn't be included in German history?
The United States has done far less harm in its history than Germany, Russia or even China, and possibly less than Western Europe taken as a whole, but let's not pretend that American history has no external effects, or that the rise of the USA was anything other than an invasion.
History seems to be benefiting from a new generation of numerate historians. It was an earlier computer analysis of the accounts of the British Royal Navy that showed that for many years it was the most expensive arm of government, and how important its financing was as a cause of the English Civil Wars. (I'm sure there's a lot more like this going on but this happens to be my period of interest.)
I'd like to see the same analysis applied to WW2 and Vietnam, especially the excess fatalities for 5 years after the wars. I am pretty sure the real costs of wars are systematically concealed by governments.
You will be six feet deep in horse shit. I admire the Amish and respect their principles greatly, but their way of life would not support the current US population (and much of the current Western population don't have the intelligence, skills or motivation to follow it.)
The Cambridge group were not academic spies looking for research and trade secrets. The idea was to infiltrate the Establishment, for which they were well placed. Attendance at a university wasn't relevant; what was relevant was their connections through the Apostles, and the contacts they made.
Incidentally, Kim Philby maintained that he did not spy on Britain for the Soviet Union; he spied on the USA on behalf of both. Perhaps bizarrely to American ideas, the Cambridge group seem to have seen themselves as patriots, helping to protect Britain against American domination. Their motivation was completely different from the Chinese spies in the USA, and the two cases are in no way comparable.
I agree with you about the Prius but I have a nitpick. The Prius doesn't have a CVT. That chain in there is fixed, it just allows the arrangement of the gears to be a little more compact. In conventional terms, the Prius has neither a gearbox nor a CVT, just a very, very clever three way planetary gear system, a gasoline engine and two electric motors one of which acts also as a generator and can go in reverse. There are explanations out there on the Internet, and they can boggle your brain. The Gen 3 eliminates the chain altogether.
I think the reason that Prius owners are so loyal is that, put simply, the Prius is far and away the best of its kind. For the same money you can get faster cars, but none that will get you long distances with so little fatigue. The only other cars I can think of which are so good for long distances are Mercs, BMWs and Jaguars costing around 50% more to buy, and twice as much to run.
Your comment, and the article you cite, should rate as insightful, and you have put it most succinctly. At the very least, the educated tend to think more deeply about why and how things are as they are, and to consult more widely. They also may well feel more strongly about ideas than the uneducated.
But not all, and I think you're making my point. Many people nowadays regard religions, almost per se, as a kind of wishful nonsense or fairy tales (though the original fairy tales were pretty serious). But when you ask "Why should Christians maintain a Jewish superstition" you betray your lack of joined up knowledge. Jesus, as far as we can gather, was in almost all ways an orthodox Jew, squarely in the prophetic tradition. The origins of Christianity have to be considered in that context.
I am absolutely in agreement with you on the doctrine of the Trinity; it isn't to be found in the Bible but is an accretion as the early Church become the State religion of the Roman Empire, in both Eastern and Western flavors.
Where I disagree is that you have a very simplistic view of the history of the Churches. Your idea that " its history is rife with individuals trying to make their church more popular by blending in local non christian concepts, softening the tone of unpopular language, and removing or changing phrases that might offend" applies to the early Church and much missionary activity in Africa, but is a complete misrepresentation of the actual mainstream history of the Church, which has been trying to get back to a more authentic Christianity in many variants for a long time, from the Irish Church in the Dark Ages through the Cathars and the mainstream Protestants, along with renewal in the Catholic Church itself (the Reformation and Liberation Theology.) The simple fact that attempts at Catholic renewal have largely failed, so that the present Pope looks backwards to the Roman Empire rather than forwards, doesn't mean that there are not many Catholics who privately side with Hans Kung, for instance.
Unless you have studied the historic background in real depth - and I haven't, I am no expert - it is a great mistake to pontificate about the origins and development of Christianity. The Bible may be wrong in many respects about factual matters, but it has a significant impact on world affairs right down to the election of American politicians. It needs to be recognised for what it is: a very dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. I forget who said it, but there is a saying that the calibre of big ideas is more important even than the calibre of big guns.
Just to start, the "Vulgate" (Latin translation of the Bible) is so called because Latin was the ordinary language of educated people. The Bible wasn't left in Latin; the texts that have come down to us are in Hebrew, Greek, Coptic and a few others. And the first translation at the behest of an English King was into English (the King James version.)
Your comment about modern translations is also confused. The Jews have a taboo on the pronunciation of the Name in Hebrew. This is why Jews may cheerfully say "God forbid" or "from your mouth to God's ears" - the word "God" in English isn't forbidden. (and I wouldn't directly print even a transliteration of the name on Slashdot, despite being an agnostic.) The nonexistent word "Jehovah" arises precisely because pointed versions of Torah used to point the name with the vowels of Adonai to remind the reader to substitute Adonai instead, and insufficiently educated Christians thought that it was a real word.
The real problem with the laity reading the Bible without sufficient education turned out to be entirely justified. The fear was that, through lack of scholarship, they wouldn't understand what they were reading, and would start up deviant sects. The existence of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons, which began in exactly such a way, makes the point. The really weird thing to my mind is the fundamentalist Evangelicals who combine the non-Biblical overemphasis on Jesus to which you (in my view correctly) allude, with a ridiculous misunderstanding of the way to understand Genesis.
The builders of Pisa didn't do a bad job. They lived in a pre-geology era. The Baptistery on the same site is fine. Builders continue to build on unsuitable sites, but without the same excuse. Winchester Cathedral was built on marshy ground on a foundation of, wait for it, elm logs. Who in their right senses builds a stone building on a platform of logs? Answer: prescientific people who believed that God took a personal interest in their work. Now we live in an age when we have materials science and huge accumulated knowledge, we can overcome the problems and keep those buildings up. To put it another way, building a concrete Enterprise wouldn't be a challenge for modern civil engineering, and it wouldn't need state of the art building methods. In relative terms, the builders could do a much worse job than the people who put up Pisa and still come up with a satisfactory result.
The continued existence of the Eiffel Tower is an accident. M. Eiffel built it as a demonstration of what could be done with the new technology of steel framing. It was intended to be temporary, but it became an iconic symbol of France just by being (a) big and (b) in Paris.
In Bavaria, Ludwig II von Sachsenhausen caused a load of pre-Hollywood fantasy castles to be built; for many people they are the defining image of Bavaria. Personally I barely know the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars, but I suspect that a huge building in the shape of an enormous fantasy spaceship would, in exactly the same way, define its own myth. If it wasn't built too well, before long there would be a campaign to rebuild or restore it.
I actually have a copy of the WW2 book "Britain's Glorious Navy", edited by Sir Reginald Bacon and passed on to me by my father, who was given it during his training. It is pretty authoritative and it makes it clear that you are wrong. They were not authorised to attack enemy ships, nor were they equipped to do so. They were armed purely for defence against submarines and aircraft. Furthermore, armed merchant ships were directly managed by the Government. They were in no sense at all "privateers". The ships were leased to the British Government at a lease of 5% of capital value per annum.
Large passenger liners were used as escort ships, and equipped with guns up to 6 inch. They were very unsafe because they were not armoured, but they were being used as temporary cruisers, not as merchant ships.
During an earlier phase of piracy, the Bristol merchants were faced with the need to protect their ships. Many of them were Quakers. The solution was that they seconded a number of their (non-Quaker) sailors to the Navy to crew the protection ships, and paid for the protection.
In short, in two periods for which I have documentary evidence, the solution was to increase the Naval presence for offence, and in the case of WW2 to give merchant ships guns and depth charges to protect against marine attack. It was not to turn merchant ships into offensive/carrier hybrids.
How about the US government stops listening to Netanyahu and the paranoid wing of the Israeli government, listens to its own intelligence (and the former head of Mossad), recognises Iran as a regional power that is no worse than Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, and starts using serious diplomacy on the slow process of getting Iran's head out of the sand? As Churchill remarked, jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
Armed merchantmen have been tried in the past. It has failed for a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones is that then pirates will shoot to kill the crews of any ships that pass. This is the law of unintended consequences that organisations like the NRA like to keep quiet about; if the good guys acquire guns, the bad guys simply acquire bigger guns, and become nastier.
Exactly as with American inner cities, the problem is that crime works because the alternative is not to have an income. The pirates are the products of a shit-hole failed State. The people who need shooting are the on-shore warlords. Once you have government, and law, and an economy, most people do not want to earn their living by risking being shot at.
Is US "healthcare" companies lobbying to be able to take it over below a fair market price and exploit it, and the 70 or so MPs they are giving money too. It's a scandal.
The basic system works, but politicians feel the need to interfere with it at the behest of McKinsey - who may, if you are paranoid enough, have been the stalking horse for the US companies. Labour set ridiculous and disconnected "targets" which invited abuse of the system - just as happened with education in Chicago, as reported in Freakonomics - and the Conservatives keep trying to find ways to stop the "undeserving poor" from benefiting while lining their pockets - I'm sorry, acquainting themselves with what the US companies have to offer.
At the next election, a number of seats will be contested by retired GPs and consultants. This could well mean that the medical profession has the balance of power in a hung Parliament. I like the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
The capture by the Royal Navy of not one but two Enigmas at sea in the course of the war was very important to the Battle of the Atlantic, and hence to the survival of the UK, but it surely had little effect on the outcome for the USA. I suggest that radar and rdf were actually as, if not more important, and that in those cases honours are even - the magnetron in the UK, and the work of the Rad Lab at MIT. In fact, in a bad attack of historical revisionism, the work of the Rad Lab may well have been far more important than the Manhattan Project. With complete air and sea superiority, an invasion of Japan was never necessary - the entire country could have been contained until it had no fighting assets left. The Bomb was just cheaper. But without radar, control of the Pacific and the Atlantic would have taken much, much longer.
The only workable response in that hypothetical situation would be to move the control knob into neutral and apply both brakes. The engine management will prevent the engine from blowing up. If the clutch doesn't disengage, still apply both brakes with maximum force (anything else could destroy the brakes by pad wear.)
My own suspicion, which is at least supported by events so far, is that a single inhabitable planet does not contain sufficient energy resources to allow any intelligent form of life any significant way of getting off-planet. The energy consumption needed to get to a technological civilisation may be such that by the time the necessary engineering skills exists, an energy crisis has been reached the outcome of which is either population collapse or evolution to a state more like an ant community than anything else.
Very few non-military ships are capable of working anywhere in the world in all seasons. Some sailing ships are, nuclear icebreakers can. Any cruise liner has a maximum safe working map which varies from season to season, and then there are further restrictions like don't keep steaming at night where there is ice. By the time of the Titanic all these things were well known and understood. What seems to have happened, quite simply, is that for commercial reasons the owners instructed the captain to exceed the safe working envelope of the Titanic. There may have been contributory factors, like the question of whether the helm orders were the right way round (because steam practice was the reverse of sail practice). The failure of the wireless operator (thanks for the correction above) to recognise the seriousness of the warning from the Californian was a serious, and stupid, dereliction of ordinary duty of care, but the fact is that if one experienced captain thought it best to stop, another could have done so without the warning.
In short, it was a multicausal accident, but almost all the causes were well known.
I'm not sure of the relevance of Jutland. As far as I can see the principal lesson of Jutland was "Don't mix old and new ships in your battle fleets", and that had been amply demonstrated in earlier WW1 engagements.
A pity I can't correct my own post.
The root cause of the Titanic disaster was, in fact, free market capitalism. (The people who down-mod things they disagree with, instead of responding to them, may now proceed as usual.)
That was in a 15 year period. Now we need to know how many people in China would typically have died from the same causes in that period. This is exactly where proper data collection and analysis is needed - to what extent was the destruction caused by the wars responsible for the civilian deaths? Were there other factors (weather patterns, for instance) involved? Was China more fragile than the United States, so that a war in which fewer died directly had a much bigger knock on effect? What similarities and differences were there with the Cultural Revolution, with a similar death rate?
During the American wars with Britain, the Royal Navy had a well publicised policy of freeing captured slaves on American ships, thus encouraging them to mutiny on one hand, and making them very determined not to allow their new ships to fall into American hands on the other.
I think it was Jay Gould (and if not I apologise to his shade) who observed that the usual distinction between "hard" and "soft" science is completely backward. Physics advanced faster than chemistry, and chemistry faster than biology, because in fact it is physics that is "not-hard", and especially the social sciences and economics that are very hard indeed. We had a model of dynamics that was "good enough" by 1700AD, but the causes of infectious diseases wouldn't be understood for roughly another 150 years. (We've just seen what happens when a load of bankers think physicists are capable of writing financial models).
However, as the originators of CERN would probably agree, because something is difficult is not a reason not to try it.
In my own experience, most of the people who object to statistical modeling do so because the results confound cherished beliefs. For instance, the arts graduates who run the British Home Office despise statistics because so many studies have shown that their approaches to crime don't work, and don't want to know about medical and psychological studies of the effects of various drugs because the results do not suit the agenda of the Daily Mail and the drinks companies. During WW2, the High Command of the RAF had a statistical wing that was demonstrating that (a) carpet bombing was a failure and (b) air crews did not become safer with experience. So what did they do? Ignored them, of course. But that is all the more reason why they should be done, and done as rigorously as possible.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion. But as the analysis did its best to allow for immigration and emigration, and did comparisons with other periods, your argument needs a bit more beef than "dislike". In my own field of interest, naval history, things like manning levels, pay rates, construction, weights of shot, water capacity, access to navigational equipment and the like turn out to be far better predictors of outcomes than the "Great Man" ideas of historians of the past. The outcome of the Battle of Britain was almost entirely determined by engineering factors - radar, and the fact that the British fighters were developed a little later than the German ones and so benefited from better engineering. The massacres in Rwanda and El Salvador can be better understood by analysing population density, land use and economic power than by speculation over tribal or political conflict. Proper statistical analysis of history - not numeric analysis, whatever that is - is not only illuminating in itself but could eventually give models with predictive power.
The United States has done far less harm in its history than Germany, Russia or even China, and possibly less than Western Europe taken as a whole, but let's not pretend that American history has no external effects, or that the rise of the USA was anything other than an invasion.
I'd like to see the same analysis applied to WW2 and Vietnam, especially the excess fatalities for 5 years after the wars. I am pretty sure the real costs of wars are systematically concealed by governments.
You will be six feet deep in horse shit. I admire the Amish and respect their principles greatly, but their way of life would not support the current US population (and much of the current Western population don't have the intelligence, skills or motivation to follow it.)
Incidentally, Kim Philby maintained that he did not spy on Britain for the Soviet Union; he spied on the USA on behalf of both. Perhaps bizarrely to American ideas, the Cambridge group seem to have seen themselves as patriots, helping to protect Britain against American domination. Their motivation was completely different from the Chinese spies in the USA, and the two cases are in no way comparable.
I think the reason that Prius owners are so loyal is that, put simply, the Prius is far and away the best of its kind. For the same money you can get faster cars, but none that will get you long distances with so little fatigue. The only other cars I can think of which are so good for long distances are Mercs, BMWs and Jaguars costing around 50% more to buy, and twice as much to run.
Your comment, and the article you cite, should rate as insightful, and you have put it most succinctly. At the very least, the educated tend to think more deeply about why and how things are as they are, and to consult more widely. They also may well feel more strongly about ideas than the uneducated.
I am absolutely in agreement with you on the doctrine of the Trinity; it isn't to be found in the Bible but is an accretion as the early Church become the State religion of the Roman Empire, in both Eastern and Western flavors.
Where I disagree is that you have a very simplistic view of the history of the Churches. Your idea that " its history is rife with individuals trying to make their church more popular by blending in local non christian concepts, softening the tone of unpopular language, and removing or changing phrases that might offend" applies to the early Church and much missionary activity in Africa, but is a complete misrepresentation of the actual mainstream history of the Church, which has been trying to get back to a more authentic Christianity in many variants for a long time, from the Irish Church in the Dark Ages through the Cathars and the mainstream Protestants, along with renewal in the Catholic Church itself (the Reformation and Liberation Theology.) The simple fact that attempts at Catholic renewal have largely failed, so that the present Pope looks backwards to the Roman Empire rather than forwards, doesn't mean that there are not many Catholics who privately side with Hans Kung, for instance.
Unless you have studied the historic background in real depth - and I haven't, I am no expert - it is a great mistake to pontificate about the origins and development of Christianity. The Bible may be wrong in many respects about factual matters, but it has a significant impact on world affairs right down to the election of American politicians. It needs to be recognised for what it is: a very dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. I forget who said it, but there is a saying that the calibre of big ideas is more important even than the calibre of big guns.
Your comment about modern translations is also confused. The Jews have a taboo on the pronunciation of the Name in Hebrew. This is why Jews may cheerfully say "God forbid" or "from your mouth to God's ears" - the word "God" in English isn't forbidden. (and I wouldn't directly print even a transliteration of the name on Slashdot, despite being an agnostic.) The nonexistent word "Jehovah" arises precisely because pointed versions of Torah used to point the name with the vowels of Adonai to remind the reader to substitute Adonai instead, and insufficiently educated Christians thought that it was a real word.
The real problem with the laity reading the Bible without sufficient education turned out to be entirely justified. The fear was that, through lack of scholarship, they wouldn't understand what they were reading, and would start up deviant sects. The existence of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons, which began in exactly such a way, makes the point. The really weird thing to my mind is the fundamentalist Evangelicals who combine the non-Biblical overemphasis on Jesus to which you (in my view correctly) allude, with a ridiculous misunderstanding of the way to understand Genesis.
The builders of Pisa didn't do a bad job. They lived in a pre-geology era. The Baptistery on the same site is fine. Builders continue to build on unsuitable sites, but without the same excuse. Winchester Cathedral was built on marshy ground on a foundation of, wait for it, elm logs. Who in their right senses builds a stone building on a platform of logs? Answer: prescientific people who believed that God took a personal interest in their work. Now we live in an age when we have materials science and huge accumulated knowledge, we can overcome the problems and keep those buildings up. To put it another way, building a concrete Enterprise wouldn't be a challenge for modern civil engineering, and it wouldn't need state of the art building methods. In relative terms, the builders could do a much worse job than the people who put up Pisa and still come up with a satisfactory result.
In Bavaria, Ludwig II von Sachsenhausen caused a load of pre-Hollywood fantasy castles to be built; for many people they are the defining image of Bavaria. Personally I barely know the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars, but I suspect that a huge building in the shape of an enormous fantasy spaceship would, in exactly the same way, define its own myth. If it wasn't built too well, before long there would be a campaign to rebuild or restore it.
Large passenger liners were used as escort ships, and equipped with guns up to 6 inch. They were very unsafe because they were not armoured, but they were being used as temporary cruisers, not as merchant ships.
During an earlier phase of piracy, the Bristol merchants were faced with the need to protect their ships. Many of them were Quakers. The solution was that they seconded a number of their (non-Quaker) sailors to the Navy to crew the protection ships, and paid for the protection.
In short, in two periods for which I have documentary evidence, the solution was to increase the Naval presence for offence, and in the case of WW2 to give merchant ships guns and depth charges to protect against marine attack. It was not to turn merchant ships into offensive/carrier hybrids.
How about the US government stops listening to Netanyahu and the paranoid wing of the Israeli government, listens to its own intelligence (and the former head of Mossad), recognises Iran as a regional power that is no worse than Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, and starts using serious diplomacy on the slow process of getting Iran's head out of the sand? As Churchill remarked, jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
Exactly as with American inner cities, the problem is that crime works because the alternative is not to have an income. The pirates are the products of a shit-hole failed State. The people who need shooting are the on-shore warlords. Once you have government, and law, and an economy, most people do not want to earn their living by risking being shot at.
Summary: piracy is a symptom, not the cause.
The IT guy who never documented. Or filed anything. We thought it was about job preservation. The senior manager asked "Is he dyslexic?".
The basic system works, but politicians feel the need to interfere with it at the behest of McKinsey - who may, if you are paranoid enough, have been the stalking horse for the US companies. Labour set ridiculous and disconnected "targets" which invited abuse of the system - just as happened with education in Chicago, as reported in Freakonomics - and the Conservatives keep trying to find ways to stop the "undeserving poor" from benefiting while lining their pockets - I'm sorry, acquainting themselves with what the US companies have to offer.
At the next election, a number of seats will be contested by retired GPs and consultants. This could well mean that the medical profession has the balance of power in a hung Parliament. I like the idea.