The thinking is that the bronze age didn't end because iron was better for weapons, but the bronze age ended because tin and copper were relatively rare compared to iron and frequently needed to be traded long distance. When the bronze age saw the collapse of its trading networks, people turned to local resources, which meant iron.
There's some disagreement over this: the collapse of the trading networks could have been caused by increased use of iron weapons causing the collapse of the bronze age civilizations.
Historian Robert Drews discusses this in his book The End of the Bronze Age.
It's not that the iron weapons were necessarily much better at that point. Bronze worker Neil Burridge discusses this on his web site:
"In recent television programme for the BBC, one of my bronze swords was repeatedly stuck against a reproduction of an early iron sword, in a test to show the advantages of iron over bronze. Even though both myself and Hector Cole (the iron sword maker) had advised the programme makers the that the bronze sword would do better than expected, they were very surprised. The bronze sword was more than a match for the iron, both blades received heavy damage. "
Robert Drews argues that ironworking may have been available earlier than previously believed, allowing societies that possessed it to overwhelm established bronze age societies with large numbers of relatively cheap weapons - the scarcity of tin limited the availability of bronze weapons, but iron ore is much more common. Certainly something caused the sudden collapse around 1200 BCE, and there's lot of evidence it was something military.
The book was written 20 years ago, I don't know if there is more recent evidence - not my field.
This doesn't even go into states in this country without enough industry where they have to rely on tax dollars that come from other states to support their people. Does that count as living in a place that can't support itself? Or making poor choices and blaming some other?
No. Large numbers of people leave the expensive states (such as California) to retire in less expensive locations, and they bring their social security and medi-care benefits with them. This creates the illusion that some state's tax dollars are going somewhere else, that they are paying more than their "fair" share, or that something unfair or inappropriate is going on - a false impression that the unscrupulous are quick to capitalize on for political advantage.
If these people didn't have the option to move somewhere else, their original state would have to pay more to support them - or they would have to save more money, reducing spending and the associated direct tax income in the original state's economy, plus creating stronger political pressure to limit taxes, with all kinds of long term consequences.
All kinds of things work this way.
For another example, many poor people are found in warmer, less expensive locations where the cost of living is lower because they don't have to heat their living quarters as much (and perhaps food is less expensive, and perhaps also they can grow more of their food). As with the retirees, these people bring their welfare benefits with them, creating the impression in some quarters that some states are getting more than their fair share (and leading to the false conclusion that they can't support their population). But if this didn't happen, if these people were forced in live in more expensive locations, the other states would actually be paying more to support these people.
Economists in discussing these matters use the phrase "comparative advantage": some places are just better at supplying certain services or producing certain things. We're not talking expensive luxury crops like California almonds or avocados, but rather staple crops like rice, or wheat, or basic necessities like lumber, most of which are produced in locations with relatively low populations, far from the wealthy cities and states.
Similarly, if you can't grow it or farm it or fish it, you have to mine it - and that tends to take place far from the places that ultimately need the end products of mining. We're not just talking about expensive metals, but staples like toothpaste and salt, and things like copper wire for electrical power so people have computers, light, heat, and air conditioning.
The US federal government subsidizes the production and transportation of these goods so that they can be available at lower cost in other locations - funding to maintain the interstate highway system and coastal or river waterways are examples of such subsidies. Many others exist.
The federal government also pays huge amounts for related research (such as agricultural research).
Even if natural comparative advantage wasn't a factor (things like climate and soil, or minerals, or ports convenient to oil-producing locations), simply the consideration that cost of living is higher in some locations can give others a comparative advantage, which naturally leads to goods and services being produced in the less expensive locations, with subsidies used to assist in moving the goods to more expensive locations.
All this creates the illusion that some states (or regions with states) are receiving "more than their fair share". But if these enormous subsidies weren't available, people in the other states (or regions) would have to pay a lot more for the basic necessities of life. It's not that some places are paying more than their fair share, its that the tax dollars being spent in some locations are lowering the cost of living for for those that are paying: it's actually a bargain due to the comparative advantage.
Every civilized country on earth has national health care. Except the US.
If by "national health care" you mean single payer, hence the government runs the health care system, that's a myth.
Both Switzerland and Holland do not have such a system. They don't have unrestricted capitalism or a massively unethical legal profession either, and they aren't plagued with deeply entrenched corruption.
Both these other systems work quite well, with good stats and costs on par with other Western European nations (9-11% of GDP - well below the USA at over 17% of GDP).
National health care should not be the goal: the systems currently run by the US government (VA and MediCare) don't work particularly well. Fixing the problems with entrenched corruption and unethical practice of law is a better approach, otherwise you just end up with a very expensive national health care system that doesn't work well because you haven't cured the underlying diseases in the legal and political system.
Giving people a direct vote on health care issues (similar to the Swiss system) would also make sense.
If you take the "everybody needs a baseline" theory, which is not in itself wrong, and apply it to what an economy is really about, you get Universal Basic Employment (UBE).
This was what the New Deal programs did back in the 1930's. Nobody got hand-outs for very long, as it was seen as undignified and unfair. So instead of just handing out welfare money and inducing inflation into the economy with no overall gain for anyone, they instituted government make-work to build infrastructure and quality-of-life improvements (like all of those over-built stone signs and pavilions at national parks). The government paid a living wage for this, and slowly the economy began to improve as more people had a little cash to spend and more improvements were made to infrastructure that enabled more businesses to do more work within their means and provide goods and services that they weren't able to provide before.
That's completely a myth. The USA at points during the 1920's (without those government programs) seems to have had the lowest unemployment in the developed world - but after two terms of FDR (and Hoover before that) it didn't even make the top 10 list. Government policy took what should have been a relatively minor recession, and turned it into the Great Depression.
The New Deal policies were an unmitigated disaster. A lot of it had to do with taking money away from things that could actually improve the economy, and moving it to things that didn't. Keynesian economics (or arguably a misapplication of Keynes ideas) was also a huge part of the problem. The high tariffs were also a big part of the disaster.
Huge amounts of New Deal spending were not oriented towards fixing the problems, they instead were used to buy votes. Both access to jobs and the income one would get in those jobs was far higher in swing states (independent of cost of living). It certainly wasn't about a "living wage". Things were especially bad in the South, and the group most affected was African-Americans (who had the misfortune of voting Republican in those days, as that had been the party of Lincoln, and thus were last in line when it came to getting government funds under a government controlled by the Democrats of the day).
Also, New Deal programs caused a lot of private spending on charity to go away, especially local and state level spending.
FDR was charismatic and had the Roosevelt name, but he really didn't understand how business or an economy works. His personal finances throughout his lifetime had always been a disaster - his rich family bailed out his mistakes time after time, but nobody could bail him out when he kept repeating the same mistakes as President.
FDR had to relax a lot of his policies to make WW2 work, and after he died many of those his successors no longer had the political capital to reimplement them. This is the real reason the Great Depression finally ended - it had been caused by government, prolonged by government, and was finally ended by reducing the amount of government interference in the economy. This is NOT to say that regulation is always a bad thing - Adam Smith talks at length about the need for it in The Wealth of Nations (1776), it is a critical element to make capitalism work - but it needs to be right kind of regulation.
The Vedder and Gallaway economic history of unemployment in the USA in the 20th century is a good starting point for examining the evidence on this period.
Personally, I think that copyrights would need to have something like twenty years' duration to be worthwhile, and patents really need that.
There's probably no reason why copyright couldn't have a shorter duration for personal non-commercial use - perhaps 20 years as you suggest - while still providing some form of protection for authors with respect to other people making money off their works. That protection wouldn't necessarily have to involve control over contract for the whole duration. For example, authors could be due a share of the gross for any monetary (or equivalent) transactions including their works, starting after 20 years and running for their lifetime.
It doesn't seem fair to let third parties make money from copying other people's work without any compensation, certainly not if the copy is substantial. But at the same time, control over contract is overly strong - and also raises the question of unethical practice of law, since the legal profession is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to contract related matters.
We could limit "authors" to human authors, causing the right to receive that share to not apply to corporations - the people actually creating the works would get the share, even if the work had been done for hire. The corporation paying for the work would get the usual benefits for the initial 20 year period. Or we might even go further, and allow the authors to get a smaller share of the gross even for the first 20 years, with the corporation getting the benefit of paying less than it otherwise would, then getting a larger share after the 20 years expire.
Even for patents, control over contract for the full period isn't necessarily in the interests of society. But the problems with patent law are in any event more fundamental, and not primarily a matter of duration.
Patents are in the Constitution along with copyrights so they are legal.
The Bill of Rights trumps the original Constitution, and as such patents (like copyright) are only legal to the extent that the do not violate fundamental rights.
It has been pointed out on this forum numerous times in the past that the current IP systems (including patent law) do in fact violate fundamental rights in their implementation, including rights such as (but not limited to) the right to reasonable conduct, the right to freedom of thought (and curiosity), and (most importantly) the right to ethical practice of law. I'm sure you can lookup those discussions with a search engine.
The problem is that we have a number of ethical conflicts of interest which result in the US legal profession choosing to allow these IP systems to continue in operation in their current form despite the fact that they violate fundamental rights. This is done in complete disregard for the oaths that people swear to uphold the law, and in complete disregard for the fact that infringement of fundamental rights has been "under the colour of law" has been a criminal offence in US federal law for a long time.
Unfortunately, judges are generally selected by politicians who are legal professionals themselves, and who are allowed to accept campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals. US legal history shows clearly the negative effects of that policy: there are all kinds of ethics problems in US law that the judges are choosing to do nothing about and there are many precedents that clearly involve legal ethics issues where the courts are silent on these issues. In many ways, the history of US law is the history of legal ethics issues, with the good guys losing most of the battles. It's not an accident that the rest of the world makes fun of the US legal system.
Again, these are points that has been made numerous times on this forum, and can readily be looked up.
It's the classic dilemma: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Capitalist countries win more Nobel Prizes, publish more science, and have more technical innovation.
It depends entirely on how you define 'Socialist' and 'Capitalist'. A lot of that scientific and technical innovation is coming from European countries with nationalised healthcare and strong social safety nets. You'd probably have to count them as 'both'.
Not really - that's a common misconception. Socialism "is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production" (Wikipedia).
i.e. Socialism is where the workers own the means of production (I believe that comes from Marx and Engels).
That isn't particularly the case for European countries - Europe has roughly as many billionaires as the USA, and lots of wealthy people who are aren't quite billionaires - these people to a large extent control the means of production. Europe does have more people working for small businesses than the USA (Schmitt and Lane 2009), so here one could make a case that the employees are at least closer to the means of production.
Nationalized healthcare and strong social safety nets are not indications of socialism. It's not the means of production that is controlled in most situations in Europe, it's the outputs of production that are taxed at high rates to provide the social safety nets - something rather different in an economic sense.
It's also worth noting that several nations in Europe do not have nationalized healthcare in the sense of single-payer. I believe Holland and Switzerland fall into this category. This makes it even harder to generalize about the underlying system (though it's worth nothing that most European nations - including both of these - spend far less on healthcare than the USA and still get much better outcomes).
Probably the best term for the European nations is "capitalist welfare state". The USA is also a capitalist welfare state, of course, but one with deeply entrenched special interest groups influencing the government in ways that create negative outcomes on many social health indicators for most of the population. These groups include a largely unethical legal profession, two corrupt political parties, governments that fund part of their operations through unethical means, the health insurance companies, and others.
Often, describing the European nations as "socialist" is used in the USA as a propaganda weapon, intended to distract people from the corruption that is the true problem. Hence the importance of understanding the real definition of the word "socialist".
You have the absolute right to speak your mind without intervention from the government.
No, you don't. If there was an absolute right, then you could speakers in every persons home and force them to listen to your voice - at any volume level desired, even at damaging sound levels - interfering with a whole host of fundamental rights, such as the right to privacy, and the right to have working hearing.
Your freedom to wave your fist around is legitimately limited by law when it conflicts with somebody else's freedom to not have your fist in their personal space.
And you have the absolute right to group together in any way you see fit (freedom of assembly).
Not you don't, if this was an absolute right than your freedom to assemble would interfere with the rights of others to travel - your assembly could block the streets - and hence the right of others to assemble - your assembly could prevent people from getting together with people of groups you didn't approve of - and your assembly could interfere with the right of others to privacy as you could assemble in somebody else's house without their permission.
Every campaign finance law is blatantly unconstitutional.
False. The right to long term public oversight over government and the political process arises under the 9th Amendment, as a right retained by the people, and the 10th Amendment, as a right reserved to the people. Laws that provide this oversight are an implementation of the Bill of Rights, not a violation of it.
And yes, there are very valid reasons to want restrictions on finances and anonymity. But you should be required to get an amendment to the constitution in order to implement them, because this "well, it really is important that..." exception to the letter of the law has rendered the constitution moot.
With respect to finance, the Amendment already exists - and has since the Bill of Rights was written.
Anonymity with respect to speech is a different issue - but spending money is not something any rational person would consider a form of speech - and that can be regulated.
You can create your own grammars in Perl 6! Many times I have wanted to implement a DSL for my programs, but the barrier to entry is so high with learning YACC and LEX. I think it's worth taking a look at for this alone, and that was just the first thing I clicked on. If it weren't for your comment I don't think I would have taken the time to check it out. Thanks!
There hasn't been much reason to learn YACC and LEX for a long time.
ANTLR is a much better choice. It's a lot simpler than YACC and LEX while still being extremely powerful.
If you understood the basics of how ANTLR works, then you can build your own parser for simple languages pretty easily. ANTLR can generate code in a number of major languages, but not Perl (though you could certainly come up with a way to run it from Perl if you really wanted to use it from Perl for some reason - the output of a parser is just a tree, and you can certainly represent a tree as text).
Some of the advanced features of ANTLR are complex and will take some time and practice to understand - but most folks won't need these.
If you're looking for more resources on parsing, Ronald Mak's book is an excellent introduction to the general topic of parsing (and interpreting) computer languages - far more readable than most, with an emphasis on how to do it rather than on abstract theory - certainly a better first book in the subject than the ones that usually get selected for courses.
It's not that math is bad, but too much too soon is bad for those that learn by doing, which is most of us - a point a lot of professors have trouble grasping.
I tried in vain for years to convince my local HOA of this, they would have none of it. Despite our Alley way being a private street, H shaped with no through traffic, they still insisted that we must have our alley light on. It was obvious that none of my neighbors believed it was necessary... One of the chairs of the committee would always spread the false safety concern on the Facebook group, and I'd always reply with the studies that shows that more light does not correlate to less crime, to which he would be dismissive.
Unfortunately, this kind of story is typical. We have an interesting situation in the USA with respect to HOAs. It is obvious to any competent thinker that HOAs - in practice - violate MANY fundamental rights arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments.
This in turn means that contract and property law is being used as a mechanism is infringe fundamental rights "under the colour of law", which has been criminal offence under US federal law since the post-Civil War reconstruction era.
In effect, by writing the HOA-related provisions into contracts and deeds, the US local profession is effectively saying that property and contract law are the highest laws in the land, contradicting the expectation that the (open-ended) Bill of Rights will be the highest law in the land.
Since lawyers make a lot of their income from contract and property-related matters, it is clear that there is a huge ethical conflict of interest here. As the right to ethical practice of law is itself a fundamental right, that creates an additional Bill of Rights violation.
Apparently lawyers do not have to be ethical when there is money to be made.
Notice that most practising lawyers can expect to benefit from the illegal conduct here - even if they themselves are not directly involved in wrong-doing. Anything that creates an artificial demand for the services of lawyers can be expected to increase the income of all lawyers, given that the supply of lawyers is relatively fixed.
Superseding the Bill of Rights with contract and/or property law is also a violation of the Nuremberg Precedent, applicable to US law under the 9th and 10th Amendments. The public has a right to expect lawyers and judges to refrain from inappropriate conduct regardless of what their superiors in the legal chain of command decide to do (or say) - and to have an individual responsibility to recognize illegal laws as such.
It is worth noting that real estate professionals can be in a position of significant ethical conflict of interest with respect to HOAs - and yet such people are often found on the boards of these quasi-governmental organizations. As a right to ethics in government can also be asserted under the 9th Amendment, it is clear that this too is illegal.
Any legitimate restriction on property that people might want to handle via an HOA should instead (to be consistent with the Bill of Rights) be handled via local law (or perhaps direct appeal to the 9th Amendment and the federal laws that protect fundamental rights) and should follow the normal legislative and judicial process, including an ethics review with respect to the 9th Amendment and the right to ethical practice of law.
We can draw an analogy between the current HOA situation and the old Jim Crow laws. Everybody with a functioning brain knew that a government of a state in a country intended to protect the rights of man could not legitimately infringe fundamental rights on the basis of skin colour - but it happened anyway, for many decades, before the situation was finally fixed (in the sense that the illegal laws were finally overturn - nobody wronged by decades of illegal government action was ever compensated to the best of my knowledge). This history demonstrates the willingness of the US legal profession to write illegal laws - and treat those laws as if they were legitimate, doing so for decades on end.
On the contrary, I shun the products that are advertised to me in an annoying manner
I shun the products that are advertised to me IN ANY MANNER if I haven't opted in to receive that advertisement.
By "receive that advertisement" I include email, surface mail, calls, door-to-door, and billboards.
I'll go further, and shun not just the individual product being advertised, but ALL products of that vender or business, when I can do this.
Unfortunately, abusive laws that grant artificial monopolies make this difficult in many cases - but the mere fact that I received an ad from somebody and didn't ask for it will make me look FIRST at their competitors.
Note that going to a tech conference does NOT mean that I have opted in to receive advertisements from ANY vender that receives the attendee list for that conference.
These so called evil socialist countries meanwhile laugh at us while their death ages grow and do not worry about losing their retirement over a medical issue
What socialist countries? Socialism, by definition, means the workers control the means of production - and that model has always been a failure on any sort of large scale. That was demonstrated in many different places around the world during the 20th century. The change-over from socialist thinking to capitalist in places like India, China, and the USSR resulted in bringing millions of people out of poverty - the most effective anti-poverty policy decision in human history.
European countries like Sweden are not socialist, but rather are capitalist welfare states - most businesses are privately owned, and there are plenty of billionaires who play the traditional capitalist roles. Europe as a whole has about as many billionaires as the USA.
The USA is also a capitalist welfare state - but one that is far less effective at taking care of people. Lots of reasons for that, a corrupt political system and an unethical legal system being two of the big ones.
It's not even single-payer medical care that makes the difference - because there are European countries like Switzerland that do not have single-payer, but spent far less and simultaneously get better results than the USA.
Let's not confuse the issues here. It's not a question of socialism versus capitalism. That question is off the table - don't let the special interest groups in the USA (those that profit from the corruption and ethics problems) confuse the issue by putting it back on the table. The only relevant question is does the US population want to continue to tolerate deeply entrenched corruption and massive legal ethics problems?
The small-town lifestyle is not sustainable, and only works when it's being subsidized by the cities. Most of these dying towns don't have any real industry left anyway, so it's time for the people there to pack up and leave.
There is a balancing act at play here. You need some percentage of your population to work the farms needed to feed everybody.
Isn't it down to something like 1% now?
Don't assume agriculture is the only good or service rural areas provide. It's a LOT more complex than that. Water, for example, is often provided by rural areas. Power as well, especially in those areas serviced by hydroelectric. Large military bases are often located in rural areas - in the USA the military is an important path out of poverty for many people, many of whom come the cities, which means the rural areas effectively supplement the welfare programs of the cities. Similarly, many former city dwellers retire to the rural areas, which allows people to retire with less money due to the lower cost of living - that in turn makes more money available to the city government and economy before these people retire. Another big rural economic product is support for vacations and tourism, allowing city dwellers to escape from the stress of city life. Rural areas also provide education and child care in the form of camps for the children of city dwellers.
Yet anther big group of rural products is wood and mining products. A fair amount of refining and manufacturing takes place in rural areas as well - it's often more cost effective to do this closer to the source of the raw materials, rather then in the cities. Then there's science, a fair amount of which has to be done in rural areas by the nature of the task (examples include agricultural research, many aspects of environmental science, geology, atmospheric science research, even mundane things like monitoring the water being pumped into the cities). Presumably nobody will question that science is of value to city dwellers, at least over the long term. All this means people are needed in rural areas, at least part of the year - more than just farmers.
Another thing to think about: once you take into account all of these goods and services, you need some way for city dwellers to take advantage of them. This means a transportation infrastructure - bridges, roads, rail, canals, motels, restaurants, rest areas, and so forth. Agriculture also requires some of this infrastructure - in addition to the irrigation infrastructure (dams and so forth) required to support crops. You also have infrastructure for water transport (piping it into the cities), and power transport. All this needs to be maintained - and that means you need people living in rural areas near the things being maintained, since otherwise the maintenance won't be cost effective.
Just like their urban counterparts, the people in rural areas need schools, markets, hospitals, law enforcement, coast guard, and so forth, which means you need even more people. Often, of course, you don't need a lot of people in any given location, which means you tend to end up with a lot of small towns. The small town lifestyle is a sustainable lifestyle so long as the cities continue to need the goods and services produced by (or moving through) particular rural areas.
There are two ways infrastructure can be paid for: one is by higher prices in the market, and the other is government taxes. A lot of people mistakenly believe that urban areas are subsidizing rural areas. That's generally a myth: what's really happening is government taxes are being used to lower the prices city dwellers would otherwise have to pay in the market for the goods and services provided by the rural areas. If farmers, for example, had to pay for all the costs of the transportation network needed to bring goods into the cities (instead of the government), the cost of food would go up and city dwellers would pay an increased
we helped ourselves to the war chest during WW2 to get out of a crippling depression fueled by unregulated credit markets.
Myth. The crippling depression was not fueled by unregulated credit markets, it was caused by government. Hoover and later FDR attempted to keep wages high instead of letting wages adjust naturally, which had all kinds of negative consequences (the first step in turning an otherwise minor depression into the Great Depression). The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 was an unmitigated disaster, causing other countries to raise their own trade barriers and thus destroy the income from international trade, with consequences that rippled through the economy. The majority of the bank failures didn't happen because of a lack of regulation: they were caused by regulation. The majority of banks that failed were small country banks that were prohibited by law (i.e. regulation) from having diversified investments, which meant they were extremely vulnerable to failure. FDR compounded the mistakes of Hoover with one stupid idea after another (the USA went from having the lowest unemployment in the developed world in the mid 1920's, to not even being in the top 10 after eight years of FDR).
Contrary to popular belief, WW2 did not result in economic recovery, it merely traded debt for unemployment. The economy did not really recover until the 1950's. It was the undoing of many of FDR's policies after he died - tracing from the inability of Truman to continue FDR's policies, and the wisdom of Eisenhower (probably the most competent president the US has ever had) - that allowed the 1950's to be prosperous.
For more information, you might try reading the Gallaway and Vedder economic history of the USA, FDR's Folly (Powell), and New Deal or Raw Deal (Folsom).
There are entire countries where billboards are illegal (Brazil), countries where they are illegal outside of cities (France), and many cities where they are forbidden (like my own). Why ? Well, it breaks down to this: either they work or they don't work. If they don't work, then what's the point ? Get rid of them. If they work, then it means they steal some of your attention span while you should be paying attention to your driving, so they should be illegal. And they are ugly.
On a more fundamental level, Billboards are coerced participation in advertising - something that is contrary to basic notions of freedom, and thus inconsistent with fundamental rights in any society that claims to be free.
Just as it is appropriate to prevent businesses from releasing chemical pollutants into the environment, so too is it appropriate to prevent businesses from releasing marketing pollution into the social environment. Even the size and nature of business signs intended to identify a business location can and should be regulated.
ALL advertising - to be consistent with fundamental rights - should be opt in - and something that is very easy to opt out of.
This includes political advertising, and advertising for social causes.
In the USA, rights to this effect can be asserted as arising under the 9th Amendment (unspecified rights retained by the people).
Please dont tell me bullshit about LL. LL was arranged in late 41, just a few months later Russia won the biggest fight in history, involving about 4 -5 million soldiers - the battle of Stalingrad. That was the start of the end of the NAZIS. Befor eyou jump... theres no way anythign got thru to Russia by the time of Stalingrad.
You've mastered the party line comrade. Decades of Cold War propaganda agrees with you. But the facts are otherwise - and those facts are revealed by Soviet records declassified after the Cold War. Large numbers of British tanks and aircraft played a critical role in the defense of Moscow, and both British and American tanks and aircraft - in large numbers - played a critical role in 1942. To give just one example, Soviet Ace Alexander Ivanovich Pokryshkin flew the American P-39 Airacobra during 1942 (starting well before the Soviet offense at Stalingrad) and shot down many German aircraft in that plane (mostly ME-109 fighters). The fuel processing equipment and additives needed to support such high performance aircraft - which the Soviets could not yet manufacture themselves - were also supplied.
So yes, LL (Lend Lease) did get through well before Stalingrad - and early enough for Soviet personnel to learn to use the new equipment - and it played a major role, not only supplying direct military aid, but providing Soviet industry with critical components it could not manufacture in sufficient numbers and quality by itself, thus providing the long term foundation for Soviet wartime industry (and the supply of critical materials would continue through the end of the war, in staggering quantities).
Russia contribute man power and equipment like tanks that the west has no concept of.
Russian tanks and equipment have been studied in detail by the West. They had a lot of great engineers - and had the benefit of being able to learn from their mistakes during the Spanish Civil War and at Kalkin Gol. At the same time - they paid a lot of attention to paper specs, and missed some of the critical aspects of design. Good armor, decent guns, but major misses on the other stuff. The communications systems for early war T-34 and KV-1 tanks, for example, were abysmal. The tanks were also poorly organized for crew efficiency, and extremely unreliable. All this led to massive (and bloody) disasters. Fortunately, the USA was able to supply enough aluminum to build huge numbers of replacement tanks (the T-34 engines depended on this, as did Soviet fighters). The US Sherman tanks were vastly more reliable - in many battles the majority of Soviet tanks were lost to mechanical problems long before they saw the enemy.
Eventually the Soviet tank designs would be corrected, but it is noteworthy that - in Korea and during the early Arab-Isreali wars - upgunned versions of US Sherman tanks generally beat the T-34s operated by their opponents (the tanks were pretty equal by that point, but the crews were not).
For example there were literally 10x more Russian armies when Germany surrended.
Soviet armies were far smaller than their Western counterparts, so the "army count" is misleading. The USA had 12 million personnel in the Armed Forces at the end of WW2, Britain had another 5 million (not sure if that counts Commonwealth forces), and the other Allies had smaller (but still important) contingents. The Soviets had about 11.3 million personnel at the end of the war.
The truth is Russia WON ww2 by blood and guts.
False. WW2 was a team effort. The Soviet role was important - but so was that of the Western Allies. During 1943, the majority of the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) would be operating in the West (eventually 95% of the fighter squadrons, and a much higher percentage of operational aircraft), and during 1944 the majority of German tanks would end up in the West. The Bomber War occupied another million German military personnel, huge numb
You forgot one more attribute of your den: Control over the volume button.
The last time I went to a theater, (and I do mean the LAST time!), the morons had the volume cranked so high that not only was it painful to the ears, the amplifiers were well up into the distortion range, making half the dialog unintelligible.
Unfortunately, this is a common problem in Western society, and not just in theaters. It doesn't just affect the elderly, either - there are many people, even children, with hearing damage. Hearing impairment among 14 year olds is up 30% since just the 1990s. Our technology has vastly outraced our ability to regulate that technology.
The really sad thing is that this is almost always already illegal. Cinemas are workplaces, and most countries have laws regarding safety in the workplace. There are also laws regarding assault that are written broadly enough to cover this, and laws on negligence on the part of business operators leading to harm to the public. Whatever the police are doing, it's not enforcing these laws, perhaps because there are more lucrative laws to be enforcing (especially in those many jurisdictions that don't require fines from things like "traffic violations" or "parking violations" to be handled ethically).
Most people don't realize when they are exposed to damaging levels of sound, because the brain reduces the perceived noise level, and because duration is a factor. I'd like to see cell phones required to be able to make reasonably accurate sound level measurements, so they can warn the people carrying them (with the feature able to be turned off). Some flexibility in configuration would be required, since modern studies have suggested that the thresholds for negative physiological and psychological consequences are at far lower levels than the old industrial standards allow for, but that's just a software task - easy for a company like Apple to implement (assuming the hardware requirements for the measurement are already met - figuring out how to do the hardware would be a great project for government research funding).
No centralized, planned economy has ever outperformed a free market, capitalist one. Ever.
You would be wrong. There are several examples of this happening. One case would be the War Communism period of the USSR. They had double digit growth rates that outperformed every other economy in the world. How else do you think a country which was known for most of its population being indentured serfs not so long ago came go to being the power that produced the most tanks in WWII even while it was being bombed in the process?
The WWII example is completely invalid from a military history perspective. See "Feeding the Bear" by Van Tuyll for an introduction.
Truly staggering amounts of military and industrial aid were provided to the USSR during the war. This was very carefully planned in close coordination with Soviet officials: the Soviets had good weapon designs in many basic categories, so a major concern was to support Soviet manufacturing of those weapons: this allowed the Soviets to shut down many peacetime production processes, and convert others over to weapons. Huge amounts of goods were shipped via the Arctic convoys, and directly from the USA to the Soviet Union on Soviet flag ships (the USSR and Japan had a treaty that permitted this, but only for "nonmilitary" goods). Any single Arctic convoy would be typically carrying a billion dollars (in today's money) worth of aid. Over 20k US citizens were sent to the Middle East to build a railroad from Iran to the Soviet Union allowing additional goods to be shipped to the Indian Ocean and then transported by rail to the Soviets (this was for military goods that could not be shipped directly: it allowed the extremely dangerous Arctic route to be avoided).
It is estimated that 90-95% of certain critical goods used by Soviet Industry in the war, such as ball bearings, were provided to the Soviet Union from imports. Ball bearings are used in every piece of rotating machinery, including many places in tanks, artillery, aircraft, not to mention the machine tools used to make these and the ammunition they use, plus a wide variety of other industrial processing and fabrication equipment. Huge amounts of machine tools were shipped as well, and since many of the Soviet factories had been designed by US engineers prior to the war, this equipment could be used directly: it was already familiar. It is also estimated that 90% of Soviet aviation fuel for high performance aircraft was processed using US made equipment and chemical additives.
It's worth noting that both Britain and Germany actually needed to import much of their ball bearing production (the Germans imported from Sweden). Standard machine tools can't easily produce round objects, so producing these in large numbers is hard, and while the British attempted to build new assembly lines to produce these, they had lots of problems and production was never sufficient. Ball bearings were such critical components that major air raids were attempted to attack German production.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of vehicles were shipped to the Soviet Union. The vast majority of these were non-combat vehicles: they played a critical role in the logistics required to support modern warfare, not to mention manufacturing logistics. See Martin van Creveld's book for a general introduction to the logistics issues of warfare: basically in modern war attrition of equipment and supplies is huge, yet at the same time a wide variety of parts, fuels, lubricants, and other chemicals is required. This in turn means a nation needs a solid train network to get equipment near the front, and huge numbers of trunks to get equipment from the train depots to the units (both are also required to get goods to factories for refining and assembling). The Soviets were under-equipped with trucks to begin with, and most of these were lost in the first few months. As another example, the Soviets only produced 92 locomotives between 1942 and 1945: they r
Fighters becoming a romantic anachronism, like horse cavalry. And like horse cavalry they will last longer than people expect. My local National Guard unit is cavalry, reconnaissance, and had horse as late as the 1930s. In certain terrain guys sneaking around on horse was still more effective than vehicles. They were just the eyes for armored formations and not expect to fight themselves.
The Soviets used horses very effectively during WW2. More of a mounted infantry role than a cavalry one, of course, with troops dismounting to fight. The horses apparently worked out quite well given the vast distances and poor roads - better in some situations than mechanized units. Cavalry was used to exploit breakthroughs achieved by regular infantry and armor units.
Ivan Yakushin's book (2005) describes his experiences in one such unit (the 24th Guards Cavalry Regiment), as a junior officer in charge of a platoon of anti-tank guns.
The USA went mechanized as WW2 approached, only to find out that mules were more useful than trucks in the mountains of Italy. Today that role would typically be replaced by the helicopter, but a mule has the advantage it can't be shot out of the air, doesn't make a lot of noise, and has no radar signature, so perhaps there will someday still be a role for pack animals in war, under special circumstances.
I still do not see how one dreadnought and it's bodyguard would have caused more trouble than the U-boats. The Bismarck was tracked by reckon aircraft it's departure would have been quickly detected and even if the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen had gotten into a couple of convoys they were still sitting ducks once they were tracked down by a carrier group.
The Scharnhost and Gneisenau repeatedly sortied prior to the Bismark. They weren't tracked down by a carrier group on any of these occasions, and weren't sunk by air power. It was a LOT harder to track ships back then than one might suppose. The most famous commerce raider, Atlantis, would survive for over 600 days. (Scharnhorst would later be sunk by the battleship Duke of York and her escorting destroyers, Gneisenau would survive the war: carrier groups again did not play the dominant role one would suppose).
The U-Boats were a danger, but they were slow, had poor visibility, and were greatly hampered by radar. They also had a dependency on radio communications that made them quite vulnerable to intercept: the Battle of the Atlantic went through periods where one side or the other was dominant depending on who was doing a better job of reading the other side's communications.
The big problem posed by the major surface combatants was that they invalidated the entire convoy strategy. That strategy depended critically on having large numbers of small vessels to fight the U-boats. Even full size fleet destroyers were too large in some respects for maximal efficiency in this role, which fell to the smaller sloops, corvettes, and DEs. Cruisers would supplement the smaller ships when attack by smaller enemy surface combatants was possible, or when greater anti-air defense was needed. But none of these ships had much chance against a well-handled battlewagon, which could annihilate (or capture!) an entire convoy in a matter of hours - a major disaster. Just the goods alone could amount to over a billion dollars in today's money, and the ships would be a lot more. Then there's the loss of life, and the corresponding negative effects on morale to consider...
This meant that major surface combatants had to be kept close enough to respond to a sortie by their opposing counterparts, which was very expensive in terms of fuel and normal wear-and-tear, and also exposed the big (and very expensive) ships to subs, aircraft, and mines: a lucky hit could result in the loss of a big ship, with huge casualties (such as happened when the battleship Barham was torpedoed by a German sub). Worse, there simply weren't enough big surface warships to do the job, given the huge number of convoys that were needed.
Aircraft carriers could and would be used in this role as well, but the weather might not permit using the aircraft (especially during the long Northern nights and frequently-bad North Sea weather). Several of the carriers were sunk by subs as well.
Hence, the big warships posed a serious problem, and the Germans had to be taught that using them was not a workable option.
I would be happy to agree with you in the conclusion that purchasing the battleships was a bad investment for Germany, but they certainly tied up a huge amount of Allied resources for most of the war.
The Norwegian campaign proved once and for all that he who rules the seas is he who can project the most air power over strategic distances, not he who owns lots of battleships because aircraft will slaughter dreadnoughts in the absence of carrier cover; so why build dreadnoughts?
Not at all true.
In fact, during the Norwegian campaign the British aircraft carrier Glorious was sunk by two unaccompanied German battleships, with huge loss of life.
The battleships won that one (aided by radar controlled anti-surface guns, allowing them to achieve some of the most remarkable shooting of any navy during the entire war).
The most decisive naval battles of the Norwegian campaign were actually fought by surface units at Narvik - including a British battleship, which an incredibly ballsy admiral took into the fjords. These battles devastated the German destroyer force, crippling it for the rest of the war.
As the war went on, the Germans repeatedly attacked the conveys to Russia - which didn't even have battleships defending them, at least not in close escort - with air units, and were never all that successful. They certainly didn't rule the seas, despite their superior strategic air power. They actually did much better with naval units, particularly the submarines.
It was very difficult to sink warships with good anti-aircraft capabilities. The British anti-aircraft cruisers were particularly formidable. This was especially true when a large number of ships were present, and it got even harder when radar was combined with anti-aircraft guns.
Worse, lots of highly trained pilots would inevitably be lost when going up against good defenses, which meant that it wasn't an operation that could be attempted too often - terrible for morale and disastrous in terms of lost experience. That was especially true in Northern waters, where pilots could be sure that going down meant inevitable death from the chill waters: otherwise minor damage could result in sure and certain death.
Finally, aircraft of that era simply couldn't operate under as many conditions where ships could - even night flying was problematic, let alone bad weather. In the Northern regions, huge numbers of aircraft were lost due to bad weather, far more than in combat.
Look up the campaigns in the Solomon Islands, and the Aleutians, for more examples of situations where ships played an important role. The ships still had a critical role, as they do today. Combined arms wins wars, not air power.
The buff didn't even know that Blimps went out of use the moment airplanes became popular.
There's a nice museum at Moffet Field Naval Air Station in California, documenting the use of blimps in WW2, by the US Navy, to hunt submarines. It's in the most enormous hanger (height-wise) that you'll probably ever see. Very impressive.
In addition to covering convoys near North America, South America, and the Caribbean, the blimps were used over Gibraltar (launching from Africa) to cover the straight at night, when it was too dangerous for aircraft to perform that mission (which required flying at low level to operate MAD equipment).
Barrage balloons - also called blimps, presumably in British English - were used extensively in Britain during WW2 to defend against German night air raids. These were unmanned.
Even in WW1, it took a long time for aircraft pilots to learn how to shoot down a dirigible, and these were used until quite late in the war for some missions.
If you believe in property rights, the person who mixes his labor with goods or land owns it---he retains exclusive use of the property for his own productivity or enjoyment.
Not true. Many societies that recognize property rights have recognized a variety of versions of the right to roam, which gives others the right to cross private property for any of a number of different reasons. The traditions that lead to these rights sometimes go back centuries.
In general, the idea is to protect the primary natural resources of the property for the owner, and protect a small region around homes for privacy.
Thus, a hiker could cross somebody else's land for their own enjoyment, and could even keep an interesting stone they find, but they wouldn't be able to do anything that would be considering actively mining minerals. Fishing is a bit of an open area - sometimes it's allowed, sometimes not, but certainly fishing on a commercial scale would be unlikely to be permitted. Long term stay ('squatting') is generally not allowed, but some forms of overnight stay would certainly be reasonable.
Travelers on others land can certainly be expected to be courteous as well: making loud noise or littering would be a violation of others rights.
Similarly, a photographer would be able to take pictures on another person's land - within reasonable limits - and even sell those pictures. Thus, some forms of 'use for productivity' are permitted under typical versions of the right to roam.
In Britain, there was a multi-decades long civil rights movement to secure formal recognition of the right of roam, which finally succeeded in a limited sense in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000.
In a sense, the old property law rules in English Common Law can be viewed as resulting from legal ethics problems: those rules were enacted during historical periods in which wealth was concentrated in the form of land, and the lawyers creating the rules either were land-owners themselves, or expected to have land-owners as their primary clients in the future, thus creating what is known as an "ethical conflict of interest". This led to rules which favored land owners, and the new rules are a good start in correcting this long outstanding ethics problem.
A similar legal ethics problem led to the continuation of slavery in the USA: the lawyers from the South that forced the continuation of slavery were either slave owners themselves, or expected their primary future employers to be slave owners (since the slave owners had most of the wealth).
Unfortunately, this is far from being the only legal ethics problem in US history or even today. The USA still generally uses the old, unethical system for property law, as a result of state property laws inheriting from English Common Law. This is one of the reasons why so much land is 'posted' or fenced off, even when not in use.
These laws are certainly in violation of fundamental rights arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments: in the Land of the Free, any individual right or freedom that other modern civilized states choose to recognize must be equally applicable to Americans. This makes a lot of trespassing arrests illegal, of course: the police officers making these illegal arrests, and the judges that violate their oaths by upholding these illegal laws might benefit from studying the historical events at a place called Nuremberg.
Governments at various levels in the USA sometimes infringe the right to travel in various other illegal ways, such as closing highways during storms (preventing good Samaritans from helping others, and preventing people from helping their families), or closing wilderness areas to 'protect' endangered species (hikers aren't going to be any more of a problem to a fish - for example - than the bears and birds are).
Navigable waterways are protected in US law, but even here unethical lawyers create a lot of problems by quibbling over the definition of navigable (and completely ign
I have to wonder how this all worked logistically: ~1,200BC wasn't exactly renowned for its medical technology, regular agricultural surpluses, or food storage capabilities. Aside from motivating this many guys to slog all the way to this site, simply keeping them healthy and fed long enough so they could kill one another before disease or starvation got them must have been a real trick.
In the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9CE), a Roman army (three legions, around 15k soldiers) was slaughtered by 'primitive' German tribes, who presumably had to have at least as many troops as the Romans.
In all likelihood, the Germanic tribes of that era weren't much better off logistically than the folks at 1200 B.C. They were drawing from a heavily forested region with rough terrain, poor roads and limited crops. So if they managed it, there's no reason to suppose bronze age folks couldn't manage a few thousand.
At the Battle of Kadesh in 1304 B.C. between the Hittites and the Egyptians, according to Egyptian records the Egyptians had 20,000 men against the Hittite army of 17,000.
Many records of ancient battles are unreliable in terms of the number of troops present, viewed from the perspective of a modern understanding of logistics. Ancient authors have a tendency to give numbers that don't fit with modern calculations regarding food volume, weight, and consumption. Beyond a certain point, your pack animals simply eat too much food. There's a tendency for ancient authors to massively exaggerate for effect, compounded by the likely fact that they had no idea what was actually reasonable.
But 20k troops on a side isn't too improbable. It's when you push up to 30k-50k or more that you start to seriously need extremely well organized logistics, and probably some water transport. A few thousand troops in a Bronze Age battle is not at all surprising.
Don't get me wrong: logistics for 20k people is really hard! There's a reason they say "professionals study logistics, amateurs study tactics"! But 20k is not pushing the limits of what is possible.
Martin van Creveld's book on military logistics is a good starting point if you want more detail on the calculations.
Disease effects tended to happen over the long term, not within the scope of a short campaign. Humans are much tougher than you might expect.
So, there is no personal right to privacy to be found in the US Constitution, nor are there any other personal rights established. On the contrary: the rights of the/government/ are limited and everything else is, almost by definition, allowed.
There is no limitation to the government's ability to invade your personal property, space, etc. except for the slew of amendments that directly do so.
Lots of errors in your understanding of this matter.
The original Constitution was strongly opposed by the Anti-Federalists. To address the objections raised, a number of folks whose honor was trusted promised that a Bill of Rights would be added. People accepted this, because anybody with a functioning brain knew that it was neither militarily nor politically possible (at that time, and for the foreseeable future) to force states to remain in the Union if they didn't like the way those promises were satisfied.
As the British discovered, military logistics in the vast lands of the 13 colonies was a nightmare, even with about 1/3 of the population on their side. It took the early stages of the industrial revolution, with huge improvements in things like railroads, and the ability to build huge numbers of ships, to make a military victory over a significant number of opposing states possible for the other states.
Hence, the Constitution was for all intents and purposes accepted conditionally by pretty much everybody. Shortly thereafter, James Madison wrote a Bill of Rights, and made it open-ended to deal with the Anti-Federalist objection that any finite list of rights would be seriously incomplete and leave out really important rights (a remarkable forecast, and one that has repeatedly proven true, with the right to ethical practice of law being probably the most important right that was omitted, since it effects so many others!).
This is why the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people", and the 10th Amendment unspecified rights "reserved to the people".
Hence, there was no need to be explicit about a right to privacy: it was already covered under the umbrella of the 9th and 10th Amendments. Further, it was covered as an individual right. As with any right, of course, there can be limitations (the distinction some people make between right and privilege is largely an artificial one).
In summary, Congress gets to pass the laws, but those laws are only valid if the people decide the rights "retained by them" are not infringed.
Thus, it false to say "there is no limitation to the government's ability to ", and the amendments that "directly" limit rights are certainly not the only one's applicable.
If some courts have claimed that they consider the "right to privacy" to be a construct inferred from sources other than the 9th Amendment, this probably follows from discomfort felt by legal professionals with respect to the existence of the 9th and 10th Amendments. The idea that ordinary folks have a say is often anathema to the priests of any religion, and many judges (and other lawyers) seem to view themselves as priests of the law.
Putting this in other terms, all legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest which respect to recognizing these retained rights, and one should look at this conflict of interest as being the determinant of outcomes and language in many situations (especially those situations where legal professionals are not acting as they should with respect to fundamental rights, something that seems to happen an awful lot these days).
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The thinking is that the bronze age didn't end because iron was better for weapons, but the bronze age ended because tin and copper were relatively rare compared to iron and frequently needed to be traded long distance. When the bronze age saw the collapse of its trading networks, people turned to local resources, which meant iron.
There's some disagreement over this: the collapse of the trading networks could have been caused by increased use of iron weapons causing the collapse of the bronze age civilizations.
Historian Robert Drews discusses this in his book The End of the Bronze Age.
It's not that the iron weapons were necessarily much better at that point. Bronze worker Neil Burridge discusses this on his web site:
"In recent television programme for the BBC, one of my bronze swords was repeatedly stuck against a reproduction of an early iron sword, in a test to show the advantages of iron over bronze. Even though both myself and Hector Cole (the iron sword maker) had advised the programme makers the that the bronze sword would do better than expected, they were very surprised. The bronze sword was more than a match for the iron, both blades received heavy damage. "
Robert Drews argues that ironworking may have been available earlier than previously believed, allowing societies that possessed it to overwhelm established bronze age societies with large numbers of relatively cheap weapons - the scarcity of tin limited the availability of bronze weapons, but iron ore is much more common. Certainly something caused the sudden collapse around 1200 BCE, and there's lot of evidence it was something military.
The book was written 20 years ago, I don't know if there is more recent evidence - not my field.
This doesn't even go into states in this country without enough industry where they have to rely on tax dollars that come from other states to support their people. Does that count as living in a place that can't support itself? Or making poor choices and blaming some other?
No. Large numbers of people leave the expensive states (such as California) to retire in less expensive locations, and they bring their social security and medi-care benefits with them. This creates the illusion that some state's tax dollars are going somewhere else, that they are paying more than their "fair" share, or that something unfair or inappropriate is going on - a false impression that the unscrupulous are quick to capitalize on for political advantage.
If these people didn't have the option to move somewhere else, their original state would have to pay more to support them - or they would have to save more money, reducing spending and the associated direct tax income in the original state's economy, plus creating stronger political pressure to limit taxes, with all kinds of long term consequences.
All kinds of things work this way.
For another example, many poor people are found in warmer, less expensive locations where the cost of living is lower because they don't have to heat their living quarters as much (and perhaps food is less expensive, and perhaps also they can grow more of their food). As with the retirees, these people bring their welfare benefits with them, creating the impression in some quarters that some states are getting more than their fair share (and leading to the false conclusion that they can't support their population). But if this didn't happen, if these people were forced in live in more expensive locations, the other states would actually be paying more to support these people.
Economists in discussing these matters use the phrase "comparative advantage": some places are just better at supplying certain services or producing certain things. We're not talking expensive luxury crops like California almonds or avocados, but rather staple crops like rice, or wheat, or basic necessities like lumber, most of which are produced in locations with relatively low populations, far from the wealthy cities and states.
Similarly, if you can't grow it or farm it or fish it, you have to mine it - and that tends to take place far from the places that ultimately need the end products of mining. We're not just talking about expensive metals, but staples like toothpaste and salt, and things like copper wire for electrical power so people have computers, light, heat, and air conditioning.
The US federal government subsidizes the production and transportation of these goods so that they can be available at lower cost in other locations - funding to maintain the interstate highway system and coastal or river waterways are examples of such subsidies. Many others exist.
The federal government also pays huge amounts for related research (such as agricultural research).
Even if natural comparative advantage wasn't a factor (things like climate and soil, or minerals, or ports convenient to oil-producing locations), simply the consideration that cost of living is higher in some locations can give others a comparative advantage, which naturally leads to goods and services being produced in the less expensive locations, with subsidies used to assist in moving the goods to more expensive locations.
All this creates the illusion that some states (or regions with states) are receiving "more than their fair share". But if these enormous subsidies weren't available, people in the other states (or regions) would have to pay a lot more for the basic necessities of life. It's not that some places are paying more than their fair share, its that the tax dollars being spent in some locations are lowering the cost of living for for those that are paying: it's actually a bargain due to the comparative advantage.
There are often legitimate reasons for wh
Every civilized country on earth has national health care.
Except the US.
If by "national health care" you mean single payer, hence the government runs the health care system, that's a myth.
Both Switzerland and Holland do not have such a system. They don't have unrestricted capitalism or a massively unethical legal profession either, and they aren't plagued with deeply entrenched corruption.
Both these other systems work quite well, with good stats and costs on par with other Western European nations (9-11% of GDP - well below the USA at over 17% of GDP).
National health care should not be the goal: the systems currently run by the US government (VA and MediCare) don't work particularly well. Fixing the problems with entrenched corruption and unethical practice of law is a better approach, otherwise you just end up with a very expensive national health care system that doesn't work well because you haven't cured the underlying diseases in the legal and political system.
Giving people a direct vote on health care issues (similar to the Swiss system) would also make sense.
If you take the "everybody needs a baseline" theory, which is not in itself wrong, and apply it to what an economy is really about, you get Universal Basic Employment (UBE).
This was what the New Deal programs did back in the 1930's. Nobody got hand-outs for very long, as it was seen as undignified and unfair. So instead of just handing out welfare money and inducing inflation into the economy with no overall gain for anyone, they instituted government make-work to build infrastructure and quality-of-life improvements (like all of those over-built stone signs and pavilions at national parks). The government paid a living wage for this, and slowly the economy began to improve as more people had a little cash to spend and more improvements were made to infrastructure that enabled more businesses to do more work within their means and provide goods and services that they weren't able to provide before.
That's completely a myth. The USA at points during the 1920's (without those government programs) seems to have had the lowest unemployment in the developed world - but after two terms of FDR (and Hoover before that) it didn't even make the top 10 list. Government policy took what should have been a relatively minor recession, and turned it into the Great Depression.
The New Deal policies were an unmitigated disaster. A lot of it had to do with taking money away from things that could actually improve the economy, and moving it to things that didn't. Keynesian economics (or arguably a misapplication of Keynes ideas) was also a huge part of the problem. The high tariffs were also a big part of the disaster.
Huge amounts of New Deal spending were not oriented towards fixing the problems, they instead were used to buy votes. Both access to jobs and the income one would get in those jobs was far higher in swing states (independent of cost of living). It certainly wasn't about a "living wage". Things were especially bad in the South, and the group most affected was African-Americans (who had the misfortune of voting Republican in those days, as that had been the party of Lincoln, and thus were last in line when it came to getting government funds under a government controlled by the Democrats of the day).
Also, New Deal programs caused a lot of private spending on charity to go away, especially local and state level spending.
FDR was charismatic and had the Roosevelt name, but he really didn't understand how business or an economy works. His personal finances throughout his lifetime had always been a disaster - his rich family bailed out his mistakes time after time, but nobody could bail him out when he kept repeating the same mistakes as President.
FDR had to relax a lot of his policies to make WW2 work, and after he died many of those his successors no longer had the political capital to reimplement them. This is the real reason the Great Depression finally ended - it had been caused by government, prolonged by government, and was finally ended by reducing the amount of government interference in the economy. This is NOT to say that regulation is always a bad thing - Adam Smith talks at length about the need for it in The Wealth of Nations (1776), it is a critical element to make capitalism work - but it needs to be right kind of regulation.
The Vedder and Gallaway economic history of unemployment in the USA in the 20th century is a good starting point for examining the evidence on this period.
Personally, I think that copyrights would need to have something like twenty years' duration to be worthwhile, and patents really need that.
There's probably no reason why copyright couldn't have a shorter duration for personal non-commercial use - perhaps 20 years as you suggest - while still providing some form of protection for authors with respect to other people making money off their works. That protection wouldn't necessarily have to involve control over contract for the whole duration. For example, authors could be due a share of the gross for any monetary (or equivalent) transactions including their works, starting after 20 years and running for their lifetime.
It doesn't seem fair to let third parties make money from copying other people's work without any compensation, certainly not if the copy is substantial. But at the same time, control over contract is overly strong - and also raises the question of unethical practice of law, since the legal profession is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to contract related matters.
We could limit "authors" to human authors, causing the right to receive that share to not apply to corporations - the people actually creating the works would get the share, even if the work had been done for hire. The corporation paying for the work would get the usual benefits for the initial 20 year period. Or we might even go further, and allow the authors to get a smaller share of the gross even for the first 20 years, with the corporation getting the benefit of paying less than it otherwise would, then getting a larger share after the 20 years expire.
Even for patents, control over contract for the full period isn't necessarily in the interests of society. But the problems with patent law are in any event more fundamental, and not primarily a matter of duration.
Patents are in the Constitution along with copyrights so they are legal.
The Bill of Rights trumps the original Constitution, and as such patents (like copyright) are only legal to the extent that the do not violate fundamental rights.
It has been pointed out on this forum numerous times in the past that the current IP systems (including patent law) do in fact violate fundamental rights in their implementation, including rights such as (but not limited to) the right to reasonable conduct, the right to freedom of thought (and curiosity), and (most importantly) the right to ethical practice of law. I'm sure you can lookup those discussions with a search engine.
The problem is that we have a number of ethical conflicts of interest which result in the US legal profession choosing to allow these IP systems to continue in operation in their current form despite the fact that they violate fundamental rights. This is done in complete disregard for the oaths that people swear to uphold the law, and in complete disregard for the fact that infringement of fundamental rights has been "under the colour of law" has been a criminal offence in US federal law for a long time.
Unfortunately, judges are generally selected by politicians who are legal professionals themselves, and who are allowed to accept campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals. US legal history shows clearly the negative effects of that policy: there are all kinds of ethics problems in US law that the judges are choosing to do nothing about and there are many precedents that clearly involve legal ethics issues where the courts are silent on these issues. In many ways, the history of US law is the history of legal ethics issues, with the good guys losing most of the battles. It's not an accident that the rest of the world makes fun of the US legal system.
Again, these are points that has been made numerous times on this forum, and can readily be looked up.
It's the classic dilemma: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Capitalist countries win more Nobel Prizes, publish more science, and have more technical innovation.
It depends entirely on how you define 'Socialist' and 'Capitalist'. A lot of that scientific and technical innovation is coming from European countries with nationalised healthcare and strong social safety nets. You'd probably have to count them as 'both'.
Not really - that's a common misconception. Socialism "is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production" (Wikipedia).
i.e. Socialism is where the workers own the means of production (I believe that comes from Marx and Engels).
That isn't particularly the case for European countries - Europe has roughly as many billionaires as the USA, and lots of wealthy people who are aren't quite billionaires - these people to a large extent control the means of production. Europe does have more people working for small businesses than the USA (Schmitt and Lane 2009), so here one could make a case that the employees are at least closer to the means of production.
Nationalized healthcare and strong social safety nets are not indications of socialism. It's not the means of production that is controlled in most situations in Europe, it's the outputs of production that are taxed at high rates to provide the social safety nets - something rather different in an economic sense.
It's also worth noting that several nations in Europe do not have nationalized healthcare in the sense of single-payer. I believe Holland and Switzerland fall into this category. This makes it even harder to generalize about the underlying system (though it's worth nothing that most European nations - including both of these - spend far less on healthcare than the USA and still get much better outcomes).
Probably the best term for the European nations is "capitalist welfare state". The USA is also a capitalist welfare state, of course, but one with deeply entrenched special interest groups influencing the government in ways that create negative outcomes on many social health indicators for most of the population. These groups include a largely unethical legal profession, two corrupt political parties, governments that fund part of their operations through unethical means, the health insurance companies, and others.
Often, describing the European nations as "socialist" is used in the USA as a propaganda weapon, intended to distract people from the corruption that is the true problem. Hence the importance of understanding the real definition of the word "socialist".
You have the absolute right to speak your mind without intervention from the government.
No, you don't. If there was an absolute right, then you could speakers in every persons home and force them to listen to your voice - at any volume level desired, even at damaging sound levels - interfering with a whole host of fundamental rights, such as the right to privacy, and the right to have working hearing.
Your freedom to wave your fist around is legitimately limited by law when it conflicts with somebody else's freedom to not have your fist in their personal space.
And you have the absolute right to group together in any way you see fit (freedom of assembly).
Not you don't, if this was an absolute right than your freedom to assemble would interfere with the rights of others to travel - your assembly could block the streets - and hence the right of others to assemble - your assembly could prevent people from getting together with people of groups you didn't approve of - and your assembly could interfere with the right of others to privacy as you could assemble in somebody else's house without their permission.
Every campaign finance law is blatantly unconstitutional.
False. The right to long term public oversight over government and the political process arises under the 9th Amendment, as a right retained by the people, and the 10th Amendment, as a right reserved to the people. Laws that provide this oversight are an implementation of the Bill of Rights, not a violation of it.
And yes, there are very valid reasons to want restrictions on finances and anonymity. But you should be required to get an amendment to the constitution in order to implement them, because this "well, it really is important that..." exception to the letter of the law has rendered the constitution moot.
With respect to finance, the Amendment already exists - and has since the Bill of Rights was written.
Anonymity with respect to speech is a different issue - but spending money is not something any rational person would consider a form of speech - and that can be regulated.
You can create your own grammars in Perl 6! Many times I have wanted to implement a DSL for my programs, but the barrier to entry is so high with learning YACC and LEX. I think it's worth taking a look at for this alone, and that was just the first thing I clicked on. If it weren't for your comment I don't think I would have taken the time to check it out. Thanks!
There hasn't been much reason to learn YACC and LEX for a long time.
ANTLR is a much better choice. It's a lot simpler than YACC and LEX while still being extremely powerful.
If you understood the basics of how ANTLR works, then you can build your own parser for simple languages pretty easily. ANTLR can generate code in a number of major languages, but not Perl (though you could certainly come up with a way to run it from Perl if you really wanted to use it from Perl for some reason - the output of a parser is just a tree, and you can certainly represent a tree as text).
Some of the advanced features of ANTLR are complex and will take some time and practice to understand - but most folks won't need these.
If you're looking for more resources on parsing, Ronald Mak's book is an excellent introduction to the general topic of parsing (and interpreting) computer languages - far more readable than most, with an emphasis on how to do it rather than on abstract theory - certainly a better first book in the subject than the ones that usually get selected for courses.
It's not that math is bad, but too much too soon is bad for those that learn by doing, which is most of us - a point a lot of professors have trouble grasping.
I tried in vain for years to convince my local HOA of this, they would have none of it. Despite our Alley way being a private street, H shaped with no through traffic, they still insisted that we must have our alley light on. It was obvious that none of my neighbors believed it was necessary ... One of the chairs of the committee would always spread the false safety concern on the Facebook group, and I'd always reply with the studies that shows that more light does not correlate to less crime, to which he would be dismissive.
Unfortunately, this kind of story is typical. We have an interesting situation in the USA with respect to HOAs. It is obvious to any competent thinker that HOAs - in practice - violate MANY fundamental rights arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments.
This in turn means that contract and property law is being used as a mechanism is infringe fundamental rights "under the colour of law", which has been criminal offence under US federal law since the post-Civil War reconstruction era.
In effect, by writing the HOA-related provisions into contracts and deeds, the US local profession is effectively saying that property and contract law are the highest laws in the land, contradicting the expectation that the (open-ended) Bill of Rights will be the highest law in the land.
Since lawyers make a lot of their income from contract and property-related matters, it is clear that there is a huge ethical conflict of interest here. As the right to ethical practice of law is itself a fundamental right, that creates an additional Bill of Rights violation.
Apparently lawyers do not have to be ethical when there is money to be made.
Notice that most practising lawyers can expect to benefit from the illegal conduct here - even if they themselves are not directly involved in wrong-doing. Anything that creates an artificial demand for the services of lawyers can be expected to increase the income of all lawyers, given that the supply of lawyers is relatively fixed.
Superseding the Bill of Rights with contract and/or property law is also a violation of the Nuremberg Precedent, applicable to US law under the 9th and 10th Amendments. The public has a right to expect lawyers and judges to refrain from inappropriate conduct regardless of what their superiors in the legal chain of command decide to do (or say) - and to have an individual responsibility to recognize illegal laws as such.
It is worth noting that real estate professionals can be in a position of significant ethical conflict of interest with respect to HOAs - and yet such people are often found on the boards of these quasi-governmental organizations. As a right to ethics in government can also be asserted under the 9th Amendment, it is clear that this too is illegal.
Any legitimate restriction on property that people might want to handle via an HOA should instead (to be consistent with the Bill of Rights) be handled via local law (or perhaps direct appeal to the 9th Amendment and the federal laws that protect fundamental rights) and should follow the normal legislative and judicial process, including an ethics review with respect to the 9th Amendment and the right to ethical practice of law.
We can draw an analogy between the current HOA situation and the old Jim Crow laws. Everybody with a functioning brain knew that a government of a state in a country intended to protect the rights of man could not legitimately infringe fundamental rights on the basis of skin colour - but it happened anyway, for many decades, before the situation was finally fixed (in the sense that the illegal laws were finally overturn - nobody wronged by decades of illegal government action was ever compensated to the best of my knowledge). This history demonstrates the willingness of the US legal profession to write illegal laws - and treat those laws as if they were legitimate, doing so for decades on end.
On the contrary, I shun the products that are advertised to me in an annoying manner
I shun the products that are advertised to me IN ANY MANNER if I haven't opted in to receive that advertisement.
By "receive that advertisement" I include email, surface mail, calls, door-to-door, and billboards.
I'll go further, and shun not just the individual product being advertised, but ALL products of that vender or business, when I can do this.
Unfortunately, abusive laws that grant artificial monopolies make this difficult in many cases - but the mere fact that I received an ad from somebody and didn't ask for it will make me look FIRST at their competitors.
Note that going to a tech conference does NOT mean that I have opted in to receive advertisements from ANY vender that receives the attendee list for that conference.
These so called evil socialist countries meanwhile laugh at us while their death ages grow and do not worry about losing their retirement over a medical issue
What socialist countries? Socialism, by definition, means the workers control the means of production - and that model has always been a failure on any sort of large scale. That was demonstrated in many different places around the world during the 20th century. The change-over from socialist thinking to capitalist in places like India, China, and the USSR resulted in bringing millions of people out of poverty - the most effective anti-poverty policy decision in human history.
European countries like Sweden are not socialist, but rather are capitalist welfare states - most businesses are privately owned, and there are plenty of billionaires who play the traditional capitalist roles. Europe as a whole has about as many billionaires as the USA.
The USA is also a capitalist welfare state - but one that is far less effective at taking care of people. Lots of reasons for that, a corrupt political system and an unethical legal system being two of the big ones.
It's not even single-payer medical care that makes the difference - because there are European countries like Switzerland that do not have single-payer, but spent far less and simultaneously get better results than the USA.
Let's not confuse the issues here. It's not a question of socialism versus capitalism. That question is off the table - don't let the special interest groups in the USA (those that profit from the corruption and ethics problems) confuse the issue by putting it back on the table. The only relevant question is does the US population want to continue to tolerate deeply entrenched corruption and massive legal ethics problems?
The small-town lifestyle is not sustainable, and only works when it's being subsidized by the cities. Most of these dying towns don't have any real industry left anyway, so it's time for the people there to pack up and leave.
There is a balancing act at play here. You need some percentage of your population to work the farms needed to feed everybody.
Isn't it down to something like 1% now?
Don't assume agriculture is the only good or service rural areas provide. It's a LOT more complex than that. Water, for example, is often provided by rural areas. Power as well, especially in those areas serviced by hydroelectric. Large military bases are often located in rural areas - in the USA the military is an important path out of poverty for many people, many of whom come the cities, which means the rural areas effectively supplement the welfare programs of the cities. Similarly, many former city dwellers retire to the rural areas, which allows people to retire with less money due to the lower cost of living - that in turn makes more money available to the city government and economy before these people retire. Another big rural economic product is support for vacations and tourism, allowing city dwellers to escape from the stress of city life. Rural areas also provide education and child care in the form of camps for the children of city dwellers.
Yet anther big group of rural products is wood and mining products. A fair amount of refining and manufacturing takes place in rural areas as well - it's often more cost effective to do this closer to the source of the raw materials, rather then in the cities. Then there's science, a fair amount of which has to be done in rural areas by the nature of the task (examples include agricultural research, many aspects of environmental science, geology, atmospheric science research, even mundane things like monitoring the water being pumped into the cities). Presumably nobody will question that science is of value to city dwellers, at least over the long term. All this means people are needed in rural areas, at least part of the year - more than just farmers.
Another thing to think about: once you take into account all of these goods and services, you need some way for city dwellers to take advantage of them. This means a transportation infrastructure - bridges, roads, rail, canals, motels, restaurants, rest areas, and so forth. Agriculture also requires some of this infrastructure - in addition to the irrigation infrastructure (dams and so forth) required to support crops. You also have infrastructure for water transport (piping it into the cities), and power transport. All this needs to be maintained - and that means you need people living in rural areas near the things being maintained, since otherwise the maintenance won't be cost effective.
Just like their urban counterparts, the people in rural areas need schools, markets, hospitals, law enforcement, coast guard, and so forth, which means you need even more people. Often, of course, you don't need a lot of people in any given location, which means you tend to end up with a lot of small towns. The small town lifestyle is a sustainable lifestyle so long as the cities continue to need the goods and services produced by (or moving through) particular rural areas.
There are two ways infrastructure can be paid for: one is by higher prices in the market, and the other is government taxes. A lot of people mistakenly believe that urban areas are subsidizing rural areas. That's generally a myth: what's really happening is government taxes are being used to lower the prices city dwellers would otherwise have to pay in the market for the goods and services provided by the rural areas. If farmers, for example, had to pay for all the costs of the transportation network needed to bring goods into the cities (instead of the government), the cost of food would go up and city dwellers would pay an increased
we helped ourselves to the war chest during WW2 to get out of a crippling depression fueled by unregulated credit markets.
Myth. The crippling depression was not fueled by unregulated credit markets, it was caused by government. Hoover and later FDR attempted to keep wages high instead of letting wages adjust naturally, which had all kinds of negative consequences (the first step in turning an otherwise minor depression into the Great Depression). The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 was an unmitigated disaster, causing other countries to raise their own trade barriers and thus destroy the income from international trade, with consequences that rippled through the economy. The majority of the bank failures didn't happen because of a lack of regulation: they were caused by regulation. The majority of banks that failed were small country banks that were prohibited by law (i.e. regulation) from having diversified investments, which meant they were extremely vulnerable to failure. FDR compounded the mistakes of Hoover with one stupid idea after another (the USA went from having the lowest unemployment in the developed world in the mid 1920's, to not even being in the top 10 after eight years of FDR).
Contrary to popular belief, WW2 did not result in economic recovery, it merely traded debt for unemployment. The economy did not really recover until the 1950's. It was the undoing of many of FDR's policies after he died - tracing from the inability of Truman to continue FDR's policies, and the wisdom of Eisenhower (probably the most competent president the US has ever had) - that allowed the 1950's to be prosperous.
For more information, you might try reading the Gallaway and Vedder economic history of the USA, FDR's Folly (Powell), and New Deal or Raw Deal (Folsom).
There are entire countries where billboards are illegal (Brazil), countries where they are illegal outside of cities (France), and many cities where they are forbidden (like my own). Why ? Well, it breaks down to this: either they work or they don't work. If they don't work, then what's the point ? Get rid of them. If they work, then it means they steal some of your attention span while you should be paying attention to your driving, so they should be illegal. And they are ugly.
On a more fundamental level, Billboards are coerced participation in advertising - something that is contrary to basic notions of freedom, and thus inconsistent with fundamental rights in any society that claims to be free.
Just as it is appropriate to prevent businesses from releasing chemical pollutants into the environment, so too is it appropriate to prevent businesses from releasing marketing pollution into the social environment. Even the size and nature of business signs intended to identify a business location can and should be regulated.
ALL advertising - to be consistent with fundamental rights - should be opt in - and something that is very easy to opt out of.
This includes political advertising, and advertising for social causes.
In the USA, rights to this effect can be asserted as arising under the 9th Amendment (unspecified rights retained by the people).
Please dont tell me bullshit about LL. LL was arranged in late 41, just a few months later Russia won the biggest fight in history, involving about 4 -5 million soldiers - the battle of Stalingrad. That was the start of the end of the NAZIS. Befor eyou jump... theres no way anythign got thru to Russia by the time of Stalingrad.
You've mastered the party line comrade. Decades of Cold War propaganda agrees with you. But the facts are otherwise - and those facts are revealed by Soviet records declassified after the Cold War. Large numbers of British tanks and aircraft played a critical role in the defense of Moscow, and both British and American tanks and aircraft - in large numbers - played a critical role in 1942. To give just one example, Soviet Ace Alexander Ivanovich Pokryshkin flew the American P-39 Airacobra during 1942 (starting well before the Soviet offense at Stalingrad) and shot down many German aircraft in that plane (mostly ME-109 fighters). The fuel processing equipment and additives needed to support such high performance aircraft - which the Soviets could not yet manufacture themselves - were also supplied.
So yes, LL (Lend Lease) did get through well before Stalingrad - and early enough for Soviet personnel to learn to use the new equipment - and it played a major role, not only supplying direct military aid, but providing Soviet industry with critical components it could not manufacture in sufficient numbers and quality by itself, thus providing the long term foundation for Soviet wartime industry (and the supply of critical materials would continue through the end of the war, in staggering quantities).
Russia contribute man power and equipment like tanks that the west has no concept of.
Russian tanks and equipment have been studied in detail by the West. They had a lot of great engineers - and had the benefit of being able to learn from their mistakes during the Spanish Civil War and at Kalkin Gol. At the same time - they paid a lot of attention to paper specs, and missed some of the critical aspects of design. Good armor, decent guns, but major misses on the other stuff. The communications systems for early war T-34 and KV-1 tanks, for example, were abysmal. The tanks were also poorly organized for crew efficiency, and extremely unreliable. All this led to massive (and bloody) disasters. Fortunately, the USA was able to supply enough aluminum to build huge numbers of replacement tanks (the T-34 engines depended on this, as did Soviet fighters). The US Sherman tanks were vastly more reliable - in many battles the majority of Soviet tanks were lost to mechanical problems long before they saw the enemy.
Eventually the Soviet tank designs would be corrected, but it is noteworthy that - in Korea and during the early Arab-Isreali wars - upgunned versions of US Sherman tanks generally beat the T-34s operated by their opponents (the tanks were pretty equal by that point, but the crews were not).
For example there were literally 10x more Russian armies when Germany surrended.
Soviet armies were far smaller than their Western counterparts, so the "army count" is misleading. The USA had 12 million personnel in the Armed Forces at the end of WW2, Britain had another 5 million (not sure if that counts Commonwealth forces), and the other Allies had smaller (but still important) contingents. The Soviets had about 11.3 million personnel at the end of the war.
The truth is Russia WON ww2 by blood and guts.
False. WW2 was a team effort. The Soviet role was important - but so was that of the Western Allies. During 1943, the majority of the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) would be operating in the West (eventually 95% of the fighter squadrons, and a much higher percentage of operational aircraft), and during 1944 the majority of German tanks would end up in the West. The Bomber War occupied another million German military personnel, huge numb
You forgot one more attribute of your den: Control over the volume button.
The last time I went to a theater, (and I do mean the LAST time!), the morons had the volume cranked so high that not only was it painful to the ears, the amplifiers were well up into the distortion range, making half the dialog unintelligible.
Unfortunately, this is a common problem in Western society, and not just in theaters. It doesn't just affect the elderly, either - there are many people, even children, with hearing damage. Hearing impairment among 14 year olds is up 30% since just the 1990s. Our technology has vastly outraced our ability to regulate that technology.
The really sad thing is that this is almost always already illegal. Cinemas are workplaces, and most countries have laws regarding safety in the workplace. There are also laws regarding assault that are written broadly enough to cover this, and laws on negligence on the part of business operators leading to harm to the public. Whatever the police are doing, it's not enforcing these laws, perhaps because there are more lucrative laws to be enforcing (especially in those many jurisdictions that don't require fines from things like "traffic violations" or "parking violations" to be handled ethically).
Most people don't realize when they are exposed to damaging levels of sound, because the brain reduces the perceived noise level, and because duration is a factor. I'd like to see cell phones required to be able to make reasonably accurate sound level measurements, so they can warn the people carrying them (with the feature able to be turned off). Some flexibility in configuration would be required, since modern studies have suggested that the thresholds for negative physiological and psychological consequences are at far lower levels than the old industrial standards allow for, but that's just a software task - easy for a company like Apple to implement (assuming the hardware requirements for the measurement are already met - figuring out how to do the hardware would be a great project for government research funding).
No centralized, planned economy has ever outperformed a free market, capitalist one. Ever.
You would be wrong. There are several examples of this happening. One case would be the War Communism period of the USSR. They had double digit growth rates that outperformed every other economy in the world. How else do you think a country which was known for most of its population being indentured serfs not so long ago came go to being the power that produced the most tanks in WWII even while it was being bombed in the process?
The WWII example is completely invalid from a military history perspective. See "Feeding the Bear" by Van Tuyll for an introduction.
Truly staggering amounts of military and industrial aid were provided to the USSR during the war. This was very carefully planned in close coordination with Soviet officials: the Soviets had good weapon designs in many basic categories, so a major concern was to support Soviet manufacturing of those weapons: this allowed the Soviets to shut down many peacetime production processes, and convert others over to weapons. Huge amounts of goods were shipped via the Arctic convoys, and directly from the USA to the Soviet Union on Soviet flag ships (the USSR and Japan had a treaty that permitted this, but only for "nonmilitary" goods). Any single Arctic convoy would be typically carrying a billion dollars (in today's money) worth of aid. Over 20k US citizens were sent to the Middle East to build a railroad from Iran to the Soviet Union allowing additional goods to be shipped to the Indian Ocean and then transported by rail to the Soviets (this was for military goods that could not be shipped directly: it allowed the extremely dangerous Arctic route to be avoided).
It is estimated that 90-95% of certain critical goods used by Soviet Industry in the war, such as ball bearings, were provided to the Soviet Union from imports. Ball bearings are used in every piece of rotating machinery, including many places in tanks, artillery, aircraft, not to mention the machine tools used to make these and the ammunition they use, plus a wide variety of other industrial processing and fabrication equipment. Huge amounts of machine tools were shipped as well, and since many of the Soviet factories had been designed by US engineers prior to the war, this equipment could be used directly: it was already familiar. It is also estimated that 90% of Soviet aviation fuel for high performance aircraft was processed using US made equipment and chemical additives.
It's worth noting that both Britain and Germany actually needed to import much of their ball bearing production (the Germans imported from Sweden). Standard machine tools can't easily produce round objects, so producing these in large numbers is hard, and while the British attempted to build new assembly lines to produce these, they had lots of problems and production was never sufficient. Ball bearings were such critical components that major air raids were attempted to attack German production.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of vehicles were shipped to the Soviet Union. The vast majority of these were non-combat vehicles: they played a critical role in the logistics required to support modern warfare, not to mention manufacturing logistics. See Martin van Creveld's book for a general introduction to the logistics issues of warfare: basically in modern war attrition of equipment and supplies is huge, yet at the same time a wide variety of parts, fuels, lubricants, and other chemicals is required. This in turn means a nation needs a solid train network to get equipment near the front, and huge numbers of trunks to get equipment from the train depots to the units (both are also required to get goods to factories for refining and assembling). The Soviets were under-equipped with trucks to begin with, and most of these were lost in the first few months. As another example, the Soviets only produced 92 locomotives between 1942 and 1945: they r
Fighters becoming a romantic anachronism, like horse cavalry. And like horse cavalry they will last longer than people expect. My local National Guard unit is cavalry, reconnaissance, and had horse as late as the 1930s. In certain terrain guys sneaking around on horse was still more effective than vehicles. They were just the eyes for armored formations and not expect to fight themselves.
The Soviets used horses very effectively during WW2. More of a mounted infantry role than a cavalry one, of course, with troops dismounting to fight. The horses apparently worked out quite well given the vast distances and poor roads - better in some situations than mechanized units. Cavalry was used to exploit breakthroughs achieved by regular infantry and armor units.
Ivan Yakushin's book (2005) describes his experiences in one such unit (the 24th Guards Cavalry Regiment), as a junior officer in charge of a platoon of anti-tank guns.
The USA went mechanized as WW2 approached, only to find out that mules were more useful than trucks in the mountains of Italy. Today that role would typically be replaced by the helicopter, but a mule has the advantage it can't be shot out of the air, doesn't make a lot of noise, and has no radar signature, so perhaps there will someday still be a role for pack animals in war, under special circumstances.
I still do not see how one dreadnought and it's bodyguard would have caused more trouble than the U-boats. The Bismarck was tracked by reckon aircraft it's departure would have been quickly detected and even if the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen had gotten into a couple of convoys they were still sitting ducks once they were tracked down by a carrier group.
The Scharnhost and Gneisenau repeatedly sortied prior to the Bismark. They weren't tracked down by a carrier group on any of these occasions, and weren't sunk by air power. It was a LOT harder to track ships back then than one might suppose. The most famous commerce raider, Atlantis, would survive for over 600 days. (Scharnhorst would later be sunk by the battleship Duke of York and her escorting destroyers, Gneisenau would survive the war: carrier groups again did not play the dominant role one would suppose).
The U-Boats were a danger, but they were slow, had poor visibility, and were greatly hampered by radar. They also had a dependency on radio communications that made them quite vulnerable to intercept: the Battle of the Atlantic went through periods where one side or the other was dominant depending on who was doing a better job of reading the other side's communications.
The big problem posed by the major surface combatants was that they invalidated the entire convoy strategy. That strategy depended critically on having large numbers of small vessels to fight the U-boats. Even full size fleet destroyers were too large in some respects for maximal efficiency in this role, which fell to the smaller sloops, corvettes, and DEs. Cruisers would supplement the smaller ships when attack by smaller enemy surface combatants was possible, or when greater anti-air defense was needed. But none of these ships had much chance against a well-handled battlewagon, which could annihilate (or capture!) an entire convoy in a matter of hours - a major disaster. Just the goods alone could amount to over a billion dollars in today's money, and the ships would be a lot more. Then there's the loss of life, and the corresponding negative effects on morale to consider ...
This meant that major surface combatants had to be kept close enough to respond to a sortie by their opposing counterparts, which was very expensive in terms of fuel and normal wear-and-tear, and also exposed the big (and very expensive) ships to subs, aircraft, and mines: a lucky hit could result in the loss of a big ship, with huge casualties (such as happened when the battleship Barham was torpedoed by a German sub). Worse, there simply weren't enough big surface warships to do the job, given the huge number of convoys that were needed.
Aircraft carriers could and would be used in this role as well, but the weather might not permit using the aircraft (especially during the long Northern nights and frequently-bad North Sea weather). Several of the carriers were sunk by subs as well.
Hence, the big warships posed a serious problem, and the Germans had to be taught that using them was not a workable option.
I would be happy to agree with you in the conclusion that purchasing the battleships was a bad investment for Germany, but they certainly tied up a huge amount of Allied resources for most of the war.
The Norwegian campaign proved once and for all that he who rules the seas is he who can project the most air power over strategic distances, not he who owns lots of battleships because aircraft will slaughter dreadnoughts in the absence of carrier cover; so why build dreadnoughts?
Not at all true.
In fact, during the Norwegian campaign the British aircraft carrier Glorious was sunk by two unaccompanied German battleships, with huge loss of life.
The battleships won that one (aided by radar controlled anti-surface guns, allowing them to achieve some of the most remarkable shooting of any navy during the entire war).
The most decisive naval battles of the Norwegian campaign were actually fought by surface units at Narvik - including a British battleship, which an incredibly ballsy admiral took into the fjords. These battles devastated the German destroyer force, crippling it for the rest of the war.
As the war went on, the Germans repeatedly attacked the conveys to Russia - which didn't even have battleships defending them, at least not in close escort - with air units, and were never all that successful. They certainly didn't rule the seas, despite their superior strategic air power. They actually did much better with naval units, particularly the submarines.
It was very difficult to sink warships with good anti-aircraft capabilities. The British anti-aircraft cruisers were particularly formidable. This was especially true when a large number of ships were present, and it got even harder when radar was combined with anti-aircraft guns.
Worse, lots of highly trained pilots would inevitably be lost when going up against good defenses, which meant that it wasn't an operation that could be attempted too often - terrible for morale and disastrous in terms of lost experience. That was especially true in Northern waters, where pilots could be sure that going down meant inevitable death from the chill waters: otherwise minor damage could result in sure and certain death.
Finally, aircraft of that era simply couldn't operate under as many conditions where ships could - even night flying was problematic, let alone bad weather. In the Northern regions, huge numbers of aircraft were lost due to bad weather, far more than in combat.
Look up the campaigns in the Solomon Islands, and the Aleutians, for more examples of situations where ships played an important role. The ships still had a critical role, as they do today. Combined arms wins wars, not air power.
The buff didn't even know that Blimps went out of use the moment airplanes became popular.
There's a nice museum at Moffet Field Naval Air Station in California, documenting the use of blimps in WW2, by the US Navy, to hunt submarines. It's in the most enormous hanger (height-wise) that you'll probably ever see. Very impressive.
In addition to covering convoys near North America, South America, and the Caribbean, the blimps were used over Gibraltar (launching from Africa) to cover the straight at night, when it was too dangerous for aircraft to perform that mission (which required flying at low level to operate MAD equipment).
Barrage balloons - also called blimps, presumably in British English - were used extensively in Britain during WW2 to defend against German night air raids. These were unmanned.
Even in WW1, it took a long time for aircraft pilots to learn how to shoot down a dirigible, and these were used until quite late in the war for some missions.
If you believe in property rights, the person who mixes his labor with goods or land owns it---he retains exclusive use of the property for his own productivity or enjoyment.
Not true. Many societies that recognize property rights have recognized a variety of versions of the right to roam, which gives others the right to cross private property for any of a number of different reasons. The traditions that lead to these rights sometimes go back centuries.
In general, the idea is to protect the primary natural resources of the property for the owner, and protect a small region around homes for privacy.
Thus, a hiker could cross somebody else's land for their own enjoyment, and could even keep an interesting stone they find, but they wouldn't be able to do anything that would be considering actively mining minerals. Fishing is a bit of an open area - sometimes it's allowed, sometimes not, but certainly fishing on a commercial scale would be unlikely to be permitted. Long term stay ('squatting') is generally not allowed, but some forms of overnight stay would certainly be reasonable.
Travelers on others land can certainly be expected to be courteous as well: making loud noise or littering would be a violation of others rights.
Similarly, a photographer would be able to take pictures on another person's land - within reasonable limits - and even sell those pictures. Thus, some forms of 'use for productivity' are permitted under typical versions of the right to roam.
In Britain, there was a multi-decades long civil rights movement to secure formal recognition of the right of roam, which finally succeeded in a limited sense in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000.
In a sense, the old property law rules in English Common Law can be viewed as resulting from legal ethics problems: those rules were enacted during historical periods in which wealth was concentrated in the form of land, and the lawyers creating the rules either were land-owners themselves, or expected to have land-owners as their primary clients in the future, thus creating what is known as an "ethical conflict of interest". This led to rules which favored land owners, and the new rules are a good start in correcting this long outstanding ethics problem.
A similar legal ethics problem led to the continuation of slavery in the USA: the lawyers from the South that forced the continuation of slavery were either slave owners themselves, or expected their primary future employers to be slave owners (since the slave owners had most of the wealth).
Unfortunately, this is far from being the only legal ethics problem in US history or even today. The USA still generally uses the old, unethical system for property law, as a result of state property laws inheriting from English Common Law. This is one of the reasons why so much land is 'posted' or fenced off, even when not in use.
These laws are certainly in violation of fundamental rights arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments: in the Land of the Free, any individual right or freedom that other modern civilized states choose to recognize must be equally applicable to Americans. This makes a lot of trespassing arrests illegal, of course: the police officers making these illegal arrests, and the judges that violate their oaths by upholding these illegal laws might benefit from studying the historical events at a place called Nuremberg.
Governments at various levels in the USA sometimes infringe the right to travel in various other illegal ways, such as closing highways during storms (preventing good Samaritans from helping others, and preventing people from helping their families), or closing wilderness areas to 'protect' endangered species (hikers aren't going to be any more of a problem to a fish - for example - than the bears and birds are).
Navigable waterways are protected in US law, but even here unethical lawyers create a lot of problems by quibbling over the definition of navigable (and completely ign
I have to wonder how this all worked logistically: ~1,200BC wasn't exactly renowned for its medical technology, regular agricultural surpluses, or food storage capabilities. Aside from motivating this many guys to slog all the way to this site, simply keeping them healthy and fed long enough so they could kill one another before disease or starvation got them must have been a real trick.
In the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9CE), a Roman army (three legions, around 15k soldiers) was slaughtered by 'primitive' German tribes, who presumably had to have at least as many troops as the Romans.
In all likelihood, the Germanic tribes of that era weren't much better off logistically than the folks at 1200 B.C. They were drawing from a heavily forested region with rough terrain, poor roads and limited crops. So if they managed it, there's no reason to suppose bronze age folks couldn't manage a few thousand.
At the Battle of Kadesh in 1304 B.C. between the Hittites and the Egyptians, according to Egyptian records the Egyptians had 20,000 men against the Hittite army of 17,000.
Many records of ancient battles are unreliable in terms of the number of troops present, viewed from the perspective of a modern understanding of logistics. Ancient authors have a tendency to give numbers that don't fit with modern calculations regarding food volume, weight, and consumption. Beyond a certain point, your pack animals simply eat too much food. There's a tendency for ancient authors to massively exaggerate for effect, compounded by the likely fact that they had no idea what was actually reasonable.
But 20k troops on a side isn't too improbable. It's when you push up to 30k-50k or more that you start to seriously need extremely well organized logistics, and probably some water transport. A few thousand troops in a Bronze Age battle is not at all surprising.
Don't get me wrong: logistics for 20k people is really hard! There's a reason they say "professionals study logistics, amateurs study tactics"! But 20k is not pushing the limits of what is possible.
Martin van Creveld's book on military logistics is a good starting point if you want more detail on the calculations.
Disease effects tended to happen over the long term, not within the scope of a short campaign. Humans are much tougher than you might expect.
So, there is no personal right to privacy to be found in the US Constitution, nor are there any other personal rights established. On the contrary: the rights of the /government/ are limited and everything else is, almost by definition, allowed.
There is no limitation to the government's ability to invade your personal property, space, etc. except for the slew of amendments that directly do so.
Lots of errors in your understanding of this matter.
The original Constitution was strongly opposed by the Anti-Federalists. To address the objections raised, a number of folks whose honor was trusted promised that a Bill of Rights would be added. People accepted this, because anybody with a functioning brain knew that it was neither militarily nor politically possible (at that time, and for the foreseeable future) to force states to remain in the Union if they didn't like the way those promises were satisfied.
As the British discovered, military logistics in the vast lands of the 13 colonies was a nightmare, even with about 1/3 of the population on their side. It took the early stages of the industrial revolution, with huge improvements in things like railroads, and the ability to build huge numbers of ships, to make a military victory over a significant number of opposing states possible for the other states.
Hence, the Constitution was for all intents and purposes accepted conditionally by pretty much everybody. Shortly thereafter, James Madison wrote a Bill of Rights, and made it open-ended to deal with the Anti-Federalist objection that any finite list of rights would be seriously incomplete and leave out really important rights (a remarkable forecast, and one that has repeatedly proven true, with the right to ethical practice of law being probably the most important right that was omitted, since it effects so many others!).
This is why the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people", and the 10th Amendment unspecified rights "reserved to the people".
Hence, there was no need to be explicit about a right to privacy: it was already covered under the umbrella of the 9th and 10th Amendments. Further, it was covered as an individual right. As with any right, of course, there can be limitations (the distinction some people make between right and privilege is largely an artificial one).
In summary, Congress gets to pass the laws, but those laws are only valid if the people decide the rights "retained by them" are not infringed.
Thus, it false to say "there is no limitation to the government's ability to ", and the amendments that "directly" limit rights are certainly not the only one's applicable.
If some courts have claimed that they consider the "right to privacy" to be a construct inferred from sources other than the 9th Amendment, this probably follows from discomfort felt by legal professionals with respect to the existence of the 9th and 10th Amendments. The idea that ordinary folks have a say is often anathema to the priests of any religion, and many judges (and other lawyers) seem to view themselves as priests of the law.
Putting this in other terms, all legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest which respect to recognizing these retained rights, and one should look at this conflict of interest as being the determinant of outcomes and language in many situations (especially those situations where legal professionals are not acting as they should with respect to fundamental rights, something that seems to happen an awful lot these days).