It's actually pretty impressive how carefully thought through building codes are for things like this. Doors generally open inward to avoid whacking people in hallways and to keep occupants from getting trapped by crap in front of doors. Emergency exits and doors for rooms with large numbers of occupants open outward because stampedes of panicked people will pile up and prevent doors from swinging inward, burning everybody alive up against an unlocked door. Lights in a stairwell need a 3-way switch at the top and the bottom of the stairs so you never have to walk on stairs in the dark. As annoying as they can be, there's a huge amount of "learned the hard way" stuff that's obvious only in retrospect built into building codes.
But yeah, somebody needs to figure out a good solution to the bathroom door handle thing. Then again, once those filthy-handed former bathroom occupants are out of the bathroom, they just go and touch all of the other door handles anyway.
I can't find anything to disagree with there. It seems impossible to make the argument that the bombs were unavoidable given the state of the war. My understanding is that Admiral Yamamoto knew going into Pearl Harbor that on industrial output alone, Japan couldn't win a full scale war against the US, and the goal was to get far enough out ahead early on to secure a favorable negotiating position at the end of the war and hold on to key strategic territories. I don't see how we go from "foregone conclusion" at the beginning of the war to, "this was our only choice" at the end of the war after the enemy's war machine was beaten into the ground.
You realise that the last time the US formally declared war was in WW2? And of the 5 instances of formal declarations of war, 4 of them occurred after hostilities began.
Yup, and it's perfectly reasonable to note that once those hostilities began, the side who fired the first shot started a war. That's the part people don't seem to be getting. "Why did the US get all worked up about Pearl Harbor?" Well, because it started a war. It was completely optional in that Japan started the whole thing by expanding in east Asia and then bombing the US when it imposed sanctions. That's a big deal.
I don't get why we don't have the same types of discussions around Nazi Germany. Hitler was just rolling through Europe, and the countries he wasn't directly attacking should have known that anything they did to slow his progress would be provocative. So there's plenty of blame to go around, right?
The US knew that the economic sanctions were provocative towards Japan.
Also true. So the story is, "I was busy conquering East Asia and you imposed economic sanctions that you new would piss me off, so this whole thing is clearly your fault. You see, I wanted to conquer East Asia and your sanctions prevented me from doing that." You see, it takes two sides to start a world war. One to aggressively expand through a continent and enslave its people and one to fight back. Plenty of blame to go around.
I'd be careful there, there's plenty of instances of the USA (and it's allies, eg: Israel) mounting pre-emptive strikes without a formal declaration.
That's fine, but I don't think they act surprised when the people on the receiving end of those strikes see them as legitimate cause to go to war or ask, "What's the big deal? It was a legitimate target!"
There are horror stories from both sides.
I notice that you didn't answer the question. Like, at all.
But given the US is currently holding foreign fighters in camps (where prisoners were tortured) indefinitely, it's hard to take any moral outrage at previous POW treatment with much seriousness.
Ah, the whataboutism. Look, the US treatment of prisoners and indefinite detention is absolutely reprehensible. It needs to end and some people should be put on trial for it. Even so, I'd take it 10 times over given the choice between that behavior and Japanese treatment of prisoners and conquered people in WWII. But maybe I'm wrong. After all, there are "horror stories from both sides" which surely means it's all even steven and any criticism of Japan is misplaced US nationalism.
Right, if we assume that, then everybody knows that the war is over without atomic bombs and without an invasion. That assumption seems wrong, given that planning for the invasion had been going on for months, so the idea that the choice at the time was between the atomic bombs and this great alternative to the ground invasion isn't quite right, but let's assume it is. So now we're talking about 3-4 months of efficiently run war driving us to the foregone conclusion.
From the looks of the report, the plan was to continue bombing cities and civilian infrastructure as Japan was helpless to stop it. After 3-4 months, a combination of direct deaths from bombing, physical displacement, malnutrition and disease would cause them to give up. That certainly sounds like it would work. I have not read the full report, but the summary report you quote paints a grim picture of what that would look like. It may well have saved lives (we were only killing people at an average of 22,000 people a month in the previous 9 months, and that was frontloaded because they had gotten better at not dying immediately when we bombed their cities), but I think it's optimistic to see continued strategic bombing as a sunny scenario. It would be interesting to see an estimate of Japanese lives lost in that scenario and compare the two.
So I'm left with the unsurprising conclusion that with the benefit of hindsight, the bombs weren't necessary or optimal, but neither were they the worst of the possible outcomes. That sounds like most big wartime decisions. The question I prefer to ask is whether they were a reasonable choice, and given the plans at the time, they certainly seem to have been. As for who is more responsible for those deaths, the Japanese leadership surely new perfectly well in July of 1945 what the writers of that report knew in June of 1946, and still they chose to go forward in the face of a lost war that would achieve nothing but more civilian death and suffering. Some people seem to be selling the idea that the US killing them somewhat faster than they expected to be killed makes the US entirely responsible. I'm not buying that.
By "just waited" do you mean, "Continued to wage conventional war?" Because by that definition, they'd been "waiting" for a surrender for quite some time.
Let's assume that everything known in this document was known in August of 1945 and there was 100% agreement that if the war continued, the Japanese would surrender somewhere between November 1 and December 1. Some people seem to be suggesting that President Truman should have looked his citizens in the face after years of war and said, "I could end this war this week, but it would cost somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 Japanese lives, mostly civilian. So I'm not going to do that. Instead, we're going to fight on for another 3-4 months and pay whatever costs that brings with it because the surrender of the Japanese is inevitable anyway." That does not seem to me to be an easy thing to do or even the right thing to do, given his responsibilities as President. At some point, he's responsible for his people and the Japanese leadership is responsible for its people.
If the US started a war with that country that resulted in staggering losses on both sides, I could potentially see accepting the destruction rained down on the US as a result of that decision and forgiving it if relations returned to normal afterward, especially if they were benevolent after our surrender.
Pearl harbour was a legitimate military target, besides the huge defeat, the US's horror at this attack always puzzled me.
It was a huge defeat at the hands of a country we were not at war with at the time. So yeah, it was kind of a landmark in that it started a big fucking war. Yes, lots of war stuff happened after that, but comparing something a country does during a state of total war to something a country does when not yet at war isn't an entirely symmetrical comparison. For example, I think that bombing Hiroshima was a legitimate use of force because of the war. But if the US had just gone and bombed HIroshima before the war as the first operation to start a war with Japan, that would have been pretty fucked up. Same thing, but circumstances make a pretty big difference.
Pretty much all forces were guilty of this, but the victor writes the history books and runs the war crimes tribunals....
Are you asserting that the Allies and Axis powers all treated their POWs roughly the same?
The only morally bankrupt position is the one you've taken. Japan's ambitions were a potential threat to US ambitions. They were not a direct threat.
Right. They were just busy conquering and subjugating East Asia. The US sanctions were making that harder, which was intolerable. You see, they wanted to conquer East Asia and the US was standing in the way of that, so the US clearly got what it was asking for. If they'd have minded their own business, I'm sure the problem would have gone away.
I'm having a hard time getting that from the document in question unless you're referring to something other than this. There's a lot of good discussion about the effects of the other aspects of the war, but it also says:
The atomic bombings considerably speeded up these political maneuverings [attempts by those seeking surrender to convince had liners that it was an unwinnable war]
within the government. This in itself was partly a morale effect, since
there is ample evidence that members of the Cabinet were worried by the
prospect of further atomic bombings, especially on the remains of Tokyo.
The bombs did not convince the military that defense of the home islands
was impossible, if their behavior in government councils is adequate
testimony. It did permit the Government to say, however, that no army
without the weapon could possibly resist an enemy who had it, thus
saving "face" for the Army leaders and not reflecting on the competence
of Japanese industrialists or the valor of the Japanese soldier. In the
Supreme War Guidance Council voting remained divided, with the War
Minister and the two Chiefs of Staff unwilling to accept unconditional
surrender. There seem little doubt, however, that the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki weakened their inclination to oppose the peace
group.
...
A quip was current in high government circles at this time that the
atomic bomb was the real Kamikaze, since it saved Japan from further
useless slaughter and destruction. It is apparent that in the atomic
bomb the Japanese found the opportunity which they had been seeking, to
break the existing deadlock within the government over acceptance of the
Potsdam terms.
It's an interesting read, and I don't think the conclusions are as clear cut as what you're describing.
The "average" price of a F-150 these days is in the mid $40's, with higher end models near $60K.
When Ford announces their new F-150s for the upcoming year, I don't usually see people flipping out that they're far too expensive and out of the reach of hard working, salt-of-the-earth Americans. But when Tesla comes up with a car at $35K, suddenly people start pushing the idea that being able to afford one is a pipe dream--just another toy for rich people who are rubbing the noses of the working class in it! Those Tesla bastards!
All societies produce sociopths, it is a brain development disorder, but what ISIS have done is work out how to concentrate those individuals into a smaller geographic region while implementing systems to use and control them.
This is a really easy explanation, but it doesn't make much sense. We're talking about relatively large groups of people here. We're also talking about a disorder that doesn't usually predispose one toward self sacrifice for some greater ideal.
Did Hitler manage to put together a program to find hundreds of thousands of sociopaths from the German population? Or is it more likely that bad ideas and toxic cultural influences can make otherwise good people do terrible things?
Is there any data on how much of an issue this is? Even in a war zone? It seems like in an area of active engagement, stray bullets from a distance would be on the low end of things that cause collateral damage. I mean, we have bombs getting dropped from aircraft and missiles being shot from drones. I'd be willing to bet that even a tiny increase in the specificity of those types of weapons would save far more lives than limiting the lethal range of bullets.
This is something really important that a lot of people who live in healthy democracies miss. A lot of them seem to assume that freedom and democracy are the natural state of things and that when governments topple, democracy is likely to spring up like magic. This attitude is not helpful when it comes to our inclination to topple any government we don't like and assume that what replaces it will be better.
The reality is that at the end of a revolution, there's usually at least one faction with a lot of guns. Democracy requires that the guy with all of the guns say, "You know what? I'll just let you guys run this place instead of becoming a dictator myself." Guys who amass and lead private armies tend not to be the types of guys who do that.
It's rare that people are smart enough to say that nobody gets to be dictator. Most people just seem to want to argue over whether it's their turn to hold the whip. The lesson people get from, "The other guys abused us when they were in charge," is almost always, "Now that we're in charge, we're going to get those fuckers," instead of, "Maybe nobody should be doing this."
What are./ readers supposed to do with this "information"?
Clearly, we're supposed to get mad that the research was ever even done and then stomp on it as hard as we can to make it go away.
Sometimes research results are just research results. They may not indicate any particular course of action. But lots of people will flip the fuck out anyway because they think that the facts will be used to push action in a direction they don't like.
I don't think anybody was committing violence. They were just threatening it if people tried to enforce the law. If I was on your property and you called the police to have me removed, I don't think you could call me a peaceful protester if I made it clear that I was willing to exchange gunfire with any law enforcement office who came to remove me. That designation is reserved for people who allow themselves to be arrested without physical incident.
I'm fairly certain that Apple has a pretty substantial employee base of people and buildings in the US that do something. Assembling iPhones isn't the whole operation.
Who is getting screwed?
1. The big institutional investors, who used to face the little guys on the exchanges but now only face each other and the HFTs.
2. The floor traders on the exchanges, who used to be able to play incredible shenanigans with the markets.
Exactly this. There have always been lucky bastards who were closer to the action and used that fact to extract cash from people far away, even back when markets included trades that were done by courier moved by sailing ship. The definition of "closer" has just gotten smaller and smaller and instead of a few lucky lumps picking up big chunks of money, it's a bunch of them moving really fast to pick up pennies. Nobody has really made a convincing case that the total amount of cash that these folks extract is larger than it was in the past as a percentage of total transactions. My guess is that it's getting smaller and smaller, and the difference between how much the average Joe pays and how much institutional investors pay is getting smaller as well.
...pair debugging can be great. Two people looking at the same code and same test output at the same time can go back and forth designing tests and interpreting results really effectively, especially if the bug is at the intersection of two modules that you're reach responsible for. Of course, you don't spend all day every day debugging or something has gone very wrong wrong.
Seriously. There are enough cases about really unfair and arbitrary profiling of innocent Muslims that they don't need to use this nonsense example. If a kid writes that he lives in a terrorist house or a meth lab house or that daddy is a bank robber, somebody is going to poke around and see what's up.
A side lesson: If you actually do plan on running a terrorist house, don't have little kids living in it. They're really bad at keeping secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually pretty impressive how carefully thought through building codes are for things like this. Doors generally open inward to avoid whacking people in hallways and to keep occupants from getting trapped by crap in front of doors. Emergency exits and doors for rooms with large numbers of occupants open outward because stampedes of panicked people will pile up and prevent doors from swinging inward, burning everybody alive up against an unlocked door. Lights in a stairwell need a 3-way switch at the top and the bottom of the stairs so you never have to walk on stairs in the dark. As annoying as they can be, there's a huge amount of "learned the hard way" stuff that's obvious only in retrospect built into building codes.
But yeah, somebody needs to figure out a good solution to the bathroom door handle thing. Then again, once those filthy-handed former bathroom occupants are out of the bathroom, they just go and touch all of the other door handles anyway.
I can't find anything to disagree with there. It seems impossible to make the argument that the bombs were unavoidable given the state of the war. My understanding is that Admiral Yamamoto knew going into Pearl Harbor that on industrial output alone, Japan couldn't win a full scale war against the US, and the goal was to get far enough out ahead early on to secure a favorable negotiating position at the end of the war and hold on to key strategic territories. I don't see how we go from "foregone conclusion" at the beginning of the war to, "this was our only choice" at the end of the war after the enemy's war machine was beaten into the ground.
Yup, and it's perfectly reasonable to note that once those hostilities began, the side who fired the first shot started a war. That's the part people don't seem to be getting. "Why did the US get all worked up about Pearl Harbor?" Well, because it started a war. It was completely optional in that Japan started the whole thing by expanding in east Asia and then bombing the US when it imposed sanctions. That's a big deal.
I don't get why we don't have the same types of discussions around Nazi Germany. Hitler was just rolling through Europe, and the countries he wasn't directly attacking should have known that anything they did to slow his progress would be provocative. So there's plenty of blame to go around, right?
Also true. So the story is, "I was busy conquering East Asia and you imposed economic sanctions that you new would piss me off, so this whole thing is clearly your fault. You see, I wanted to conquer East Asia and your sanctions prevented me from doing that." You see, it takes two sides to start a world war. One to aggressively expand through a continent and enslave its people and one to fight back. Plenty of blame to go around.
That's fine, but I don't think they act surprised when the people on the receiving end of those strikes see them as legitimate cause to go to war or ask, "What's the big deal? It was a legitimate target!"
I notice that you didn't answer the question. Like, at all.
Ah, the whataboutism. Look, the US treatment of prisoners and indefinite detention is absolutely reprehensible. It needs to end and some people should be put on trial for it. Even so, I'd take it 10 times over given the choice between that behavior and Japanese treatment of prisoners and conquered people in WWII. But maybe I'm wrong. After all, there are "horror stories from both sides" which surely means it's all even steven and any criticism of Japan is misplaced US nationalism.
Right, if we assume that, then everybody knows that the war is over without atomic bombs and without an invasion. That assumption seems wrong, given that planning for the invasion had been going on for months, so the idea that the choice at the time was between the atomic bombs and this great alternative to the ground invasion isn't quite right, but let's assume it is. So now we're talking about 3-4 months of efficiently run war driving us to the foregone conclusion.
From the looks of the report, the plan was to continue bombing cities and civilian infrastructure as Japan was helpless to stop it. After 3-4 months, a combination of direct deaths from bombing, physical displacement, malnutrition and disease would cause them to give up. That certainly sounds like it would work. I have not read the full report, but the summary report you quote paints a grim picture of what that would look like. It may well have saved lives (we were only killing people at an average of 22,000 people a month in the previous 9 months, and that was frontloaded because they had gotten better at not dying immediately when we bombed their cities), but I think it's optimistic to see continued strategic bombing as a sunny scenario. It would be interesting to see an estimate of Japanese lives lost in that scenario and compare the two.
So I'm left with the unsurprising conclusion that with the benefit of hindsight, the bombs weren't necessary or optimal, but neither were they the worst of the possible outcomes. That sounds like most big wartime decisions. The question I prefer to ask is whether they were a reasonable choice, and given the plans at the time, they certainly seem to have been. As for who is more responsible for those deaths, the Japanese leadership surely new perfectly well in July of 1945 what the writers of that report knew in June of 1946, and still they chose to go forward in the face of a lost war that would achieve nothing but more civilian death and suffering. Some people seem to be selling the idea that the US killing them somewhat faster than they expected to be killed makes the US entirely responsible. I'm not buying that.
By "just waited" do you mean, "Continued to wage conventional war?" Because by that definition, they'd been "waiting" for a surrender for quite some time.
Let's assume that everything known in this document was known in August of 1945 and there was 100% agreement that if the war continued, the Japanese would surrender somewhere between November 1 and December 1. Some people seem to be suggesting that President Truman should have looked his citizens in the face after years of war and said, "I could end this war this week, but it would cost somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 Japanese lives, mostly civilian. So I'm not going to do that. Instead, we're going to fight on for another 3-4 months and pay whatever costs that brings with it because the surrender of the Japanese is inevitable anyway." That does not seem to me to be an easy thing to do or even the right thing to do, given his responsibilities as President. At some point, he's responsible for his people and the Japanese leadership is responsible for its people.
If the US started a war with that country that resulted in staggering losses on both sides, I could potentially see accepting the destruction rained down on the US as a result of that decision and forgiving it if relations returned to normal afterward, especially if they were benevolent after our surrender.
It was a huge defeat at the hands of a country we were not at war with at the time. So yeah, it was kind of a landmark in that it started a big fucking war. Yes, lots of war stuff happened after that, but comparing something a country does during a state of total war to something a country does when not yet at war isn't an entirely symmetrical comparison. For example, I think that bombing Hiroshima was a legitimate use of force because of the war. But if the US had just gone and bombed HIroshima before the war as the first operation to start a war with Japan, that would have been pretty fucked up. Same thing, but circumstances make a pretty big difference.
Are you asserting that the Allies and Axis powers all treated their POWs roughly the same?
Right. They were just busy conquering and subjugating East Asia. The US sanctions were making that harder, which was intolerable. You see, they wanted to conquer East Asia and the US was standing in the way of that, so the US clearly got what it was asking for. If they'd have minded their own business, I'm sure the problem would have gone away.
Then it is a different document than the one you cited. You want the summary report, July 1, 1946.
Likewise, starting a war isn't the same as ending one.
It's an interesting read, and I don't think the conclusions are as clear cut as what you're describing.
When Ford announces their new F-150s for the upcoming year, I don't usually see people flipping out that they're far too expensive and out of the reach of hard working, salt-of-the-earth Americans. But when Tesla comes up with a car at $35K, suddenly people start pushing the idea that being able to afford one is a pipe dream--just another toy for rich people who are rubbing the noses of the working class in it! Those Tesla bastards!
This is a really easy explanation, but it doesn't make much sense. We're talking about relatively large groups of people here. We're also talking about a disorder that doesn't usually predispose one toward self sacrifice for some greater ideal.
Did Hitler manage to put together a program to find hundreds of thousands of sociopaths from the German population? Or is it more likely that bad ideas and toxic cultural influences can make otherwise good people do terrible things?
Is there any data on how much of an issue this is? Even in a war zone? It seems like in an area of active engagement, stray bullets from a distance would be on the low end of things that cause collateral damage. I mean, we have bombs getting dropped from aircraft and missiles being shot from drones. I'd be willing to bet that even a tiny increase in the specificity of those types of weapons would save far more lives than limiting the lethal range of bullets.
This is something really important that a lot of people who live in healthy democracies miss. A lot of them seem to assume that freedom and democracy are the natural state of things and that when governments topple, democracy is likely to spring up like magic. This attitude is not helpful when it comes to our inclination to topple any government we don't like and assume that what replaces it will be better.
The reality is that at the end of a revolution, there's usually at least one faction with a lot of guns. Democracy requires that the guy with all of the guns say, "You know what? I'll just let you guys run this place instead of becoming a dictator myself." Guys who amass and lead private armies tend not to be the types of guys who do that.
It's rare that people are smart enough to say that nobody gets to be dictator. Most people just seem to want to argue over whether it's their turn to hold the whip. The lesson people get from, "The other guys abused us when they were in charge," is almost always, "Now that we're in charge, we're going to get those fuckers," instead of, "Maybe nobody should be doing this."
Clearly, we're supposed to get mad that the research was ever even done and then stomp on it as hard as we can to make it go away.
Sometimes research results are just research results. They may not indicate any particular course of action. But lots of people will flip the fuck out anyway because they think that the facts will be used to push action in a direction they don't like.
Breaking news: Power Plant Output not Affected by Population. Engineers Flabbergasted. More at 11.
I don't think anybody was committing violence. They were just threatening it if people tried to enforce the law. If I was on your property and you called the police to have me removed, I don't think you could call me a peaceful protester if I made it clear that I was willing to exchange gunfire with any law enforcement office who came to remove me. That designation is reserved for people who allow themselves to be arrested without physical incident.
I'm fairly certain that Apple has a pretty substantial employee base of people and buildings in the US that do something. Assembling iPhones isn't the whole operation.
Exactly this. There have always been lucky bastards who were closer to the action and used that fact to extract cash from people far away, even back when markets included trades that were done by courier moved by sailing ship. The definition of "closer" has just gotten smaller and smaller and instead of a few lucky lumps picking up big chunks of money, it's a bunch of them moving really fast to pick up pennies. Nobody has really made a convincing case that the total amount of cash that these folks extract is larger than it was in the past as a percentage of total transactions. My guess is that it's getting smaller and smaller, and the difference between how much the average Joe pays and how much institutional investors pay is getting smaller as well.
What percentage of IT people who discover child porn look the other way?
A line with only two data points in it? Nothing suspicious about that at all.
...pair debugging can be great. Two people looking at the same code and same test output at the same time can go back and forth designing tests and interpreting results really effectively, especially if the bug is at the intersection of two modules that you're reach responsible for. Of course, you don't spend all day every day debugging or something has gone very wrong wrong.
Seriously. There are enough cases about really unfair and arbitrary profiling of innocent Muslims that they don't need to use this nonsense example. If a kid writes that he lives in a terrorist house or a meth lab house or that daddy is a bank robber, somebody is going to poke around and see what's up.
A side lesson: If you actually do plan on running a terrorist house, don't have little kids living in it. They're really bad at keeping secrets.