No, they can't. Production of some things (especially steel) is best done at constant rates and temperatures. Starting back up invokes a huge cost.
There's a similar problem for industrial/solar grade silicon, such as that used in solar panels. If you shut the power off during production, you get this huge lump of useless, impure glass, and it's typically easier just to build a new furnace next to the old one, because if you shut off the power, that furnace is basically dead: buy a new one.
There are a lot of electricity dependent industrial processes which are continuous flow, and they've been designed that way to eke out another 10% efficiency, with the downside being 100% risk if you lose power during processing.
Those things aren't armed, so short of someone using one of those drones for a kamikaze strike (which i'd imagine would be p. hard given that the thing is flying relatively high and there are armed soldiers in the room), there isn't much one can do. You can get shot down, but that's about it.
The MQ-9 typically carries an ordnance load-out of some kind, even when operating in an observer role; it's just that when it's operating in an observer role, it carries less ordnance, not zero.
Typically, if the analysts get alerted, and while watching the feed, decide that they need to go "weapons hot", there is a military pilot or two in the room with the civilian pilots to handle laser-painting the targets, or the dropping of ordnance on them.
Along the same lines, we should establish a permanent Moon base first. The Moon is much, much, much closer to Earth than Mars [...]
You know that were are building these capabilities to get the hell as far away from the rest of you dolts as we possibly can manage to get, right?
"Closer to Earth" is about as much as a feature as "random" is a feature on an iPod Shuffle, which has a perfectly good audio feedback mechanism that could have been used in place of a screen for feedback, without compromising the ability to actually select what you wanted to have played.
"At BlackBerry we are passionate about raising the bar for security and privacy. Extra steps are taken at both a hardware and software level to authenticate Android in order to help protect you from malware and any attempts to temper with your OS."
I thought that some idiot had misspelled "tamper". After reading this article, I am not so sure that this was not in fact the intended word choice here.
It's not ad-homenim. Invoking the name of a famous person along with quotes or advice by them is attempting to use their position of fame and their reputation to lend weight to the advice.
So because they committed the fallacy of "appeal to authority", you committing the fallacy of "arguing ad hominem", thus compounding rather than pointing out the original fallacy, isn't actually a fallacy, it's magically delicious instead?
Simple: I wanna give it. You don't even have to shake it down from me.
Just sell me a phone with Sailfish OS. Here. In Brazil.
Certainly, sir.
I'll need your billing information and shipping address. Let's start with billing...
Which reserve currency will you be paying for this in? U.S. dollars, euros, pounds sterling, Japanese yen, Swiss francs, or Canadian dollars?
The Brazilian banking system did freaking *what*?!?!?!?
Sorry sir; you can not buy anything internationally, period.
Please contact your local government stooge to find out which company in your area is paying sufficient bribes to get things into your country legally, and then contact them to see which one of those is willing to import our product on your behalf.
Thank you again for calling, [any company not actually incorporated in Brazil].
Dependent Clause: In linguistics, a dependent clause (or a subordinate clause) is a clause that provides an independent clause with additional information, but which cannot stand alone as a sentence. Dependent clauses either modify the independent clause of a sentence or serve as a component of it.
The "also" applies to "the decision", as opposed to "the initial results".
The sentence is quite the run-on, and it's awkwardly constructed; however, it's grammatically correct.
A less awkward construction would be:
"Citrix's operations review initially resulted in a decision to spin off the GoTo collaboration products business into a new company. In addition, it has also motivated a decision to institute a euphemistic (in the opinion of the editors of CIO.com) 'realignment of resources', which is expected to eliminate approximately 1,000 full time and contract positions in the remaining company."
Here's the actual press release from Citrix, rather than a slashdot summary of a CIO.com article:
Look what Amazon has done to local retail in America - decimated it!
Dude, that was, in order:
(1) strip malls put individual storefronts out of business, and raised rents when they were gone
(2) shopping malls put many strip malls and individual storefronts out of business, and raised rents when they were gone
(3) Walmart put many "anchor stores" in shopping malls out of business, which then killed individual mall stores dependent on foot traffic, and killed many strip malls with limited varied compared to Walmart, and remaining storefronts, all by buying in bulk, undercutting prices (even if good had to be sold at a loss to do so), and then raising prices once the others were gone
It's all about driving down aggregate costs (which is one reason many places in California have ordinances on maximum store size: to keep Walmart out, or at least from realizing a high enough economy of scale to drive smaller stores out of business, because they are more or less the same size
Amazon was pretty much uninvolved with any of that.
Funnily the US still manufacture their own planes an weapons... and a few cars, like Teslas:)
Military manufacturing generally occurs in your own country, unless you are very good friends with your arms suppliers, or the arms in question apply technologies that you don't have. And yes, the NSA has its own chip foundries, as well, for sensitive components, so that a foreign government supplying your chips can't just tell your military to "turn off", should it come to a conflict.
I have no concrete idea what is going wrong in your country, but perhaps instead of looking at China, look at other successful nations and start copying.
We have granted MFN - most favored nation - status to China; this means we can not tariff them more than we tariff anyone else.
This means we can not tariff products manufactured in China contingent on them following the U.S. Fair Labor Relations Act standards; this makes Chinese labor cost inherently less than equivalent U.S. labor, per work unit per hour.
It also means we cannot tariff them based on not complying with U.S. environmental standards; U.S. environmental standards are among the most stringent in the world, and as a result, operating costs for U.S. factories are higher, due to things like hazardous waste disposal; this makes Chinese production costs apart from labor costs inherently less than equivalent U.S. production costs.
The combination of these things means that we have shipped most of our manufacturing to China. Not ironically, our compact fluorescent light bulbs are manufactured in China because of the mercury component required prevents U.S. manufacture, yet dead bulbs go to U.S. landfills, where the mercury accumulates. Further, we are not permitted to use standard incandescent bulbs, which do not have this environmental pollutant, due to environmental regulations regarding energy usage (this is actually an energy production problem, not an energy consumption problem).
In addition, we have what is called "the NAFTA hole". This is where countries which would ordinarily be tariffed on these things which we cannot tariff China on, ship their nearly completed products to Mexico, where they go to a factory barely on the Mexican side of the U.S./Mexico border for final assembly, manufacturing, or processing. This can be as little as shrink-wrapping or other packaging for distribution of bulk-packed items. Then they are exported from Mexico to the U.S. with no tariff. These factories are colloquially called "Maquiladoras".
And *THAT*, my friend, is what is going wrong in my country.
Regarding social changes: my impression is, the US move like a glacier and everybody is super conservative, health care is an example. Why change a bad running system if there is a chance that it is even worse afterwards, seems to be the attitude.
You have a simplistic view of Democrat (liberal) vs. Republican (conservative) politics and embedded interests. This is to be expected, if you are not from the U.S., since it's fairly nuanced as to who "owns" which platform issues.
This is predominantly because the structure of our electorate is actually as a Representative Republic, rather than a Populist Democracy, as it's usually portrayed; we are much more the Roman model, than the Greek model.
Take your health care example:
Nixon, a Republican president, proposed in 1974 a national health care system much better than the one the ACA has imposed upon us; it was single-payer, rather than forcing us to be customers of insurance companies. It was a much better plan. On his deathbed, Teddy Kennedy, a powerful Democratic senator from the state of Massachusetts, stated that his one regret in his political career was not agreeing to help Nixon implement this plan.
The current ACA, which just raised my premiums another 25% to deal with the sunset clause on federal subsidies for the state health exc
5 years experience! Imagine if that was a few years more than an apprenticeship!
Pretty clearly, to get to that point, you have to go through all the normal union crap at $28K/year and so on through journeyman, etc., to get those 5 years under your belt in management. Unless it wasn't a union shop.
Vocational schools need to amp up the sales pitch. Machinists of the Tools and Die variety make 40$ and 50$ an hour, and that ain't bad.
In the massive factories that cover most of Canada?
The Tool and die machinist jobs I was able to find had 3 of them at $80K+ a year ($40/hour = $83,200/year), and all require more than 5 years experience, two of them in supervisory roles.
NOTE: You *once again* sidestep the two most important questions: How does that fix the problem we have *today*? How do *you* suggest we end their aggressions, permanently?
Despite this, I will address your response on a theoretical basis of not provoking them further, under the assumption that they are "forgive and forget" kinds of people...
That would be my first step. And unlike your seemingly genocidal suggestion, the plan I outlined could work fairly quickly. Or hadn't you thought of that?
I thought of it. Then I dismissed it as unworkable for six reasons:
(1) The current influx of refugees into Europe from the area is a result of assholes being in charge of those countries. If we don't allow them in, then they will all be killed... because the people in power in the region are assholes.
(2) If we allow them in, we have the same problem in their destination countries as already exists in Syria; as far as the rest of us are concerned, the differences between Sunni's and Shia's is that they both want a caliphate to take over the world, but they can't agree on which asshole should be in charge, and whether the state is subservient to the clerics, or vice versa (with the clerics controlling the state anyway, in both cases). It's just a matter of time.
(3) They would just go back to swords. They already use them in videos where they behead captured scholars, journalists, teachers, and so forth. So it would do nothing to stop the killing, nor to address either the first or the second points of the dilemma on action or inaction, and, as Zen teaches us: inaction *is* an action.
(4) They are engaged in empire building and are expansionist in nature. They have taken a large area, including much of Syria, and there is no reason to believe that they will stop. The distinctive messianic element to Shia faith, and their propensity for individual clerics to practice ongoing interpretation of Islamic texts guarantees that at some point, they will have factories capable of turning out modern weapons.
(5) It is doubtful the Paris attacks were carried out with weapons and ammunition and explosives obtained from Syria. Specifically, such attacks can be expected to continue indefinitely into the future, no matter what the West does, going forward. So an embargo of the area will be ineffective, regardless of its direct impact on the area.
(6) Finally, an embargo could lead to a "Perl Harbor" situation. Let me go into some detail as to how:
One of the primary reasons for the Japanese attack on Perl Harbor, and the declaration of war on the U.S. is that the U.S., as a result of the 1940 Export Control Act, and by the end of the same month, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted from export to Japan.
A year later, the U.S. froze Japanese assets in the U.S., and embargoed oil exports to Japan, making their imperialist expansion into a Japanese Hegemony under the Tanaka Memorial document/"The Tanaka Plan" to control Manchuria, China, Indonesia, the South Sea Islands, the Maritime Provinces of USSR, India, and the remainder of the Pacific basin impossible.
So the Japanese attacked Perl Harbor just over four months later.
This is the fruits of the embargo, if enacted to the extent you are suggesting: another Perl Harbor with the weapons they do have, before they run out of supplies to continue pursuit of their goal of a caliphate
P.S.: If you think the ethnic Kurds won't continue to ignore the Iraq/Turkey border as they have always ignored it, and transfer armaments and supplies over it, as they always have, you are dreaming. If you think Iran will stay out of it forever, you are dreaming. If you think Israel won't resort to use of nuclear weapons, even if it means cutting off their own foot, if they feel compelled to defend themselves, you are dreaming.
We could start by not fomenting war in the region.
How does that fix the problem we have *today*?
How do *you* suggest we end their aggressions, permanently?
It's all blowback for our wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I would start by not continuing to do the same things that got us into this mess in the first place.
You've only identified a *theoretical* method of avoiding "blowback". Assuming, for the sake of argument a position with which I disagree vehemently, say it *is* all blowback. So you've identified a method of not fomenting enemies in the first place.
I guess, while we are at it, we will need to stop giving Israel "aid money", which pretty much everyone knows is payola to them for not using their nuclear arsenal, and jus let them nuke Syria; at least, like Pontius Pilot, we will have the ability to claim to have washed our hands of the matter.
If people from the middle east had invaded the US and taken over our country, wouldn't you fight back?
I would nuke them. A bioweapon is me being nice. I do not believe in setting rules of engagement. I do not believe in civilian non-combatants. I do believe that the fire bombing of Dresden was the right thing for the allies to do at the time.
Put yourself in other people's shoes. Engage those empathy circuits that have withered in your brain.
I simply can not empathize with Sharia Law, and how women are treated as second class citizens, not to be permitted to learn to read, stoned to death for being raped because there were not four male witnesses, and they have therefore committed adultery. I can not emphasize with the idea that they would attack civilians -- "People of the Book", to use the Prophet Muhammad's words to refer to the people in Paris.
I can not abide that they continue to deny their own people their rights, under The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Having empathy for a serial killer doesn't mean you let him go on killing.
In case you hadn't noticed, you are advocating biological warfare against a whole group of people, most of whom are innocent of any wrongdoing, which really means you need to work on the empathy thing.
I'm advocating taking the gloves off, and treating this as a case of "total warfare".
These guys aren't going away; they aren't stopping; they aren't achieving their goals; the goals they've publicly stated are irrational; they refuse to budge from their irrationalaty.
In other words: they are an implacable foe.
If not (fairly selectively) targeted biowarfare, how do you *personally* suggest we implement the modern day equivalent of the Romans destroying the city, and plowing salt into the fields after the battle of Carthage, or William Tecumseh Sherman's "march to the sea", in which he destroyed literally *everything* between Atlanta and Savannah Georgia.
How do *you* suggest we end their aggressions, permanently?
That's a serious question.
My way would have collateral damage, but would work, and could be targeted on a tribe-by-tribe basis. Make it Y-linked as well, if you think that the women are non-combatants, and should be spared.
Again: How do *you* suggest we end their aggressions, permanently?
You said specifically "Everything that needs to be done can be done by robots, once you engineers get them up to speed."
That is saying "you engineers have not sufficiently advanced robotics".
This is the same vantage point from which PETA and other less radical animal rights groups, which unlike PETA, do not capture peoples house pets and euthanize them take with regard to computer modeling for drug testing.
Either they are ignorant of the state of computer modeling from watching too much CSI, and have no idea of the limitations on the capabilities of computers, and the fact that computational biology is not advanced enough to model entire organisms, let alone the organs and other components that would be impacted by a new drug... Or they don't care (most of them fall into this bucket).
We can brute force the problem *NOW*, or we can wait until some mythical future in which robotics is advanced enough that we can magically gloss over all the current difficulties that are preventing the magical robots from being out in the OORT cloud, self-replicating as we speak, and sending us bundles of mana from heaven as we speak.
In other words, you are making solving the problem *contingent* on some *arbitrary*, and, quite frankly, *asinine* set of requirements that you've pulled out of your posterior, and using that as an excuse as to why you are standing there as a wart on the tail of progress, telling everyone who might fund our brute force efforts "it can't be done".
Well, thank you very much, Mr. Charles Holland Duell, but you can go jump in a lake and get the hell out of our way.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they can't. Production of some things (especially steel) is best done at constant rates and temperatures. Starting back up invokes a huge cost.
There's a similar problem for industrial/solar grade silicon, such as that used in solar panels. If you shut the power off during production, you get this huge lump of useless, impure glass, and it's typically easier just to build a new furnace next to the old one, because if you shut off the power, that furnace is basically dead: buy a new one.
There are a lot of electricity dependent industrial processes which are continuous flow, and they've been designed that way to eke out another 10% efficiency, with the downside being 100% risk if you lose power during processing.
An announcement by the PM that "the Dutch are at war" is different than a declaration of war. What does "being at war with an ideology" even mean?!?
Unless you are talking about the No Surrender Motorcycle Club, who decided to join the Kurds in Northern Iraq and Syria
Those things aren't armed, so short of someone using one of those drones for a kamikaze strike (which i'd imagine would be p. hard given that the thing is flying relatively high and there are armed soldiers in the room), there isn't much one can do.
You can get shot down, but that's about it.
The MQ-9 typically carries an ordnance load-out of some kind, even when operating in an observer role; it's just that when it's operating in an observer role, it carries less ordnance, not zero.
Typically, if the analysts get alerted, and while watching the feed, decide that they need to go "weapons hot", there is a military pilot or two in the room with the civilian pilots to handle laser-painting the targets, or the dropping of ordnance on them.
Along the same lines, we should establish a permanent Moon base first. The Moon is much, much, much closer to Earth than Mars [...]
You know that were are building these capabilities to get the hell as far away from the rest of you dolts as we possibly can manage to get, right?
"Closer to Earth" is about as much as a feature as "random" is a feature on an iPod Shuffle, which has a perfectly good audio feedback mechanism that could have been used in place of a screen for feedback, without compromising the ability to actually select what you wanted to have played.
Which is to say: not a feature.
What if orbital mechanics suddenly stopped working, and the reactor crashed into the Earth, because, you know, orbit and things?
The Blackberry "Priv" ad blurb...
"At BlackBerry we are passionate about raising the bar for security and privacy. Extra steps are taken at both a hardware and software level to authenticate Android in order to help protect you from malware and any attempts to temper with your OS."
I thought that some idiot had misspelled "tamper". After reading this article, I am not so sure that this was not in fact the intended word choice here.
Yes, "we" could have elected some other people, but "we" do not and would not.
By "we", you are, of course, referring to Siemens and Diebold, et al, right?
Unlike governments, corporations have no power to imprison or execute you./p>
You have obviously never met a corporate "fixer". Pray you never do; they tend to be actual psychopaths.
It's not ad-homenim. Invoking the name of a famous person along with quotes or advice by them is attempting to use their position of fame and their reputation to lend weight to the advice.
So because they committed the fallacy of "appeal to authority", you committing the fallacy of "arguing ad hominem", thus compounding rather than pointing out the original fallacy, isn't actually a fallacy, it's magically delicious instead?
Someone needs to sponsor a virginity act. That way everyone gets laid.
Simple: I wanna give it. You don't even have to shake it down from me.
Just sell me a phone with Sailfish OS. Here. In Brazil.
Certainly, sir.
I'll need your billing information and shipping address. Let's start with billing...
Which reserve currency will you be paying for this in? U.S. dollars, euros, pounds sterling, Japanese yen, Swiss francs, or Canadian dollars?
The Brazilian banking system did freaking *what*?!?!?!?
Sorry sir; you can not buy anything internationally, period.
Please contact your local government stooge to find out which company in your area is paying sufficient bribes to get things into your country legally, and then contact them to see which one of those is willing to import our product on your behalf.
Thank you again for calling, [any company not actually incorporated in Brazil].
Better get the trains, planes, buses, taxis, pedicabs, and backpacks while you are at it....
They certainly are cracking down on prepaid phone SIMs, where the owner of the phone isn't identified.
So the criminal have to go back to killing people for their cell phones? Good to know...
Dependent Clause: In linguistics, a dependent clause (or a subordinate clause) is a clause that provides an independent clause with additional information, but which cannot stand alone as a sentence. Dependent clauses either modify the independent clause of a sentence or serve as a component of it.
It's a dependent clause.
The "also" applies to "the decision", as opposed to "the initial results".
The sentence is quite the run-on, and it's awkwardly constructed; however, it's grammatically correct.
A less awkward construction would be:
"Citrix's operations review initially resulted in a decision to spin off the GoTo collaboration products business into a new company. In addition, it has also motivated a decision to institute a euphemistic (in the opinion of the editors of CIO.com) 'realignment of resources', which is expected to eliminate approximately 1,000 full time and contract positions in the remaining company."
Here's the actual press release from Citrix, rather than a slashdot summary of a CIO.com article:
https://www.citrix.com/news/an...
Look what Amazon has done to local retail in America - decimated it!
Dude, that was, in order:
(1) strip malls put individual storefronts out of business, and raised rents when they were gone
(2) shopping malls put many strip malls and individual storefronts out of business, and raised rents when they were gone
(3) Walmart put many "anchor stores" in shopping malls out of business, which then killed individual mall stores dependent on foot traffic, and killed many strip malls with limited varied compared to Walmart, and remaining storefronts, all by buying in bulk, undercutting prices (even if good had to be sold at a loss to do so), and then raising prices once the others were gone
It's all about driving down aggregate costs (which is one reason many places in California have ordinances on maximum store size: to keep Walmart out, or at least from realizing a high enough economy of scale to drive smaller stores out of business, because they are more or less the same size
Amazon was pretty much uninvolved with any of that.
Anything's better than the prior approach, which was homeopathic.
Funnily the US still manufacture their own planes an weapons ... and a few cars, like Teslas :)
Military manufacturing generally occurs in your own country, unless you are very good friends with your arms suppliers, or the arms in question apply technologies that you don't have. And yes, the NSA has its own chip foundries, as well, for sensitive components, so that a foreign government supplying your chips can't just tell your military to "turn off", should it come to a conflict.
I have no concrete idea what is going wrong in your country, but perhaps instead of looking at China, look at other successful nations and start copying.
We have granted MFN - most favored nation - status to China; this means we can not tariff them more than we tariff anyone else.
This means we can not tariff products manufactured in China contingent on them following the U.S. Fair Labor Relations Act standards; this makes Chinese labor cost inherently less than equivalent U.S. labor, per work unit per hour.
It also means we cannot tariff them based on not complying with U.S. environmental standards; U.S. environmental standards are among the most stringent in the world, and as a result, operating costs for U.S. factories are higher, due to things like hazardous waste disposal; this makes Chinese production costs apart from labor costs inherently less than equivalent U.S. production costs.
The combination of these things means that we have shipped most of our manufacturing to China. Not ironically, our compact fluorescent light bulbs are manufactured in China because of the mercury component required prevents U.S. manufacture, yet dead bulbs go to U.S. landfills, where the mercury accumulates. Further, we are not permitted to use standard incandescent bulbs, which do not have this environmental pollutant, due to environmental regulations regarding energy usage (this is actually an energy production problem, not an energy consumption problem).
In addition, we have what is called "the NAFTA hole". This is where countries which would ordinarily be tariffed on these things which we cannot tariff China on, ship their nearly completed products to Mexico, where they go to a factory barely on the Mexican side of the U.S./Mexico border for final assembly, manufacturing, or processing. This can be as little as shrink-wrapping or other packaging for distribution of bulk-packed items. Then they are exported from Mexico to the U.S. with no tariff. These factories are colloquially called "Maquiladoras".
And *THAT*, my friend, is what is going wrong in my country.
Regarding social changes: my impression is, the US move like a glacier and everybody is super conservative, health care is an example. Why change a bad running system if there is a chance that it is even worse afterwards, seems to be the attitude.
You have a simplistic view of Democrat (liberal) vs. Republican (conservative) politics and embedded interests. This is to be expected, if you are not from the U.S., since it's fairly nuanced as to who "owns" which platform issues.
This is predominantly because the structure of our electorate is actually as a Representative Republic, rather than a Populist Democracy, as it's usually portrayed; we are much more the Roman model, than the Greek model.
Take your health care example:
Nixon, a Republican president, proposed in 1974 a national health care system much better than the one the ACA has imposed upon us; it was single-payer, rather than forcing us to be customers of insurance companies. It was a much better plan. On his deathbed, Teddy Kennedy, a powerful Democratic senator from the state of Massachusetts, stated that his one regret in his political career was not agreeing to help Nixon implement this plan.
The current ACA, which just raised my premiums another 25% to deal with the sunset clause on federal subsidies for the state health exc
5 years experience! Imagine if that was a few years more than an apprenticeship!
Pretty clearly, to get to that point, you have to go through all the normal union crap at $28K/year and so on through journeyman, etc., to get those 5 years under your belt in management. Unless it wasn't a union shop.
Vocational schools need to amp up the sales pitch. Machinists of the Tools and Die variety make 40$ and 50$ an hour, and that ain't bad.
In the massive factories that cover most of Canada?
The Tool and die machinist jobs I was able to find had 3 of them at $80K+ a year ($40/hour = $83,200/year), and all require more than 5 years experience, two of them in supervisory roles.
http://ca.indeed.com/jobs?q=Ca...
Manufacturing happens in China. Nice try on the selling of vocational ed, though...
McRAM?
Yes, I would fries with that.
NOTE: You *once again* sidestep the two most important questions: How does that fix the problem we have *today*? How do *you* suggest we end their aggressions, permanently?
Despite this, I will address your response on a theoretical basis of not provoking them further, under the assumption that they are "forgive and forget" kinds of people...
That would be my first step. And unlike your seemingly genocidal suggestion, the plan I outlined could work fairly quickly. Or hadn't you thought of that?
I thought of it. Then I dismissed it as unworkable for six reasons:
(1) The current influx of refugees into Europe from the area is a result of assholes being in charge of those countries. If we don't allow them in, then they will all be killed... because the people in power in the region are assholes.
(2) If we allow them in, we have the same problem in their destination countries as already exists in Syria; as far as the rest of us are concerned, the differences between Sunni's and Shia's is that they both want a caliphate to take over the world, but they can't agree on which asshole should be in charge, and whether the state is subservient to the clerics, or vice versa (with the clerics controlling the state anyway, in both cases). It's just a matter of time.
(3) They would just go back to swords. They already use them in videos where they behead captured scholars, journalists, teachers, and so forth. So it would do nothing to stop the killing, nor to address either the first or the second points of the dilemma on action or inaction, and, as Zen teaches us: inaction *is* an action.
(4) They are engaged in empire building and are expansionist in nature. They have taken a large area, including much of Syria, and there is no reason to believe that they will stop. The distinctive messianic element to Shia faith, and their propensity for individual clerics to practice ongoing interpretation of Islamic texts guarantees that at some point, they will have factories capable of turning out modern weapons.
(5) It is doubtful the Paris attacks were carried out with weapons and ammunition and explosives obtained from Syria. Specifically, such attacks can be expected to continue indefinitely into the future, no matter what the West does, going forward. So an embargo of the area will be ineffective, regardless of its direct impact on the area.
(6) Finally, an embargo could lead to a "Perl Harbor" situation. Let me go into some detail as to how:
One of the primary reasons for the Japanese attack on Perl Harbor, and the declaration of war on the U.S. is that the U.S., as a result of the 1940 Export Control Act, and by the end of the same month, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted from export to Japan.
A year later, the U.S. froze Japanese assets in the U.S., and embargoed oil exports to Japan, making their imperialist expansion into a Japanese Hegemony under the Tanaka Memorial document/"The Tanaka Plan" to control Manchuria, China, Indonesia, the South Sea Islands, the Maritime Provinces of USSR, India, and the remainder of the Pacific basin impossible.
So the Japanese attacked Perl Harbor just over four months later.
This is the fruits of the embargo, if enacted to the extent you are suggesting: another Perl Harbor with the weapons they do have, before they run out of supplies to continue pursuit of their goal of a caliphate
P.S.: If you think the ethnic Kurds won't continue to ignore the Iraq/Turkey border as they have always ignored it, and transfer armaments and supplies over it, as they always have, you are dreaming. If you think Iran will stay out of it forever, you are dreaming. If you think Israel won't resort to use of nuclear weapons, even if it means cutting off their own foot, if they feel compelled to defend themselves, you are dreaming.
We could start by not fomenting war in the region.
How does that fix the problem we have *today*?
How do *you* suggest we end their aggressions, permanently?
It's all blowback for our wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I would start by not continuing to do the same things that got us into this mess in the first place.
You've only identified a *theoretical* method of avoiding "blowback". Assuming, for the sake of argument a position with which I disagree vehemently, say it *is* all blowback. So you've identified a method of not fomenting enemies in the first place.
I guess, while we are at it, we will need to stop giving Israel "aid money", which pretty much everyone knows is payola to them for not using their nuclear arsenal, and jus let them nuke Syria; at least, like Pontius Pilot, we will have the ability to claim to have washed our hands of the matter.
If people from the middle east had invaded the US and taken over our country, wouldn't you fight back?
I would nuke them. A bioweapon is me being nice. I do not believe in setting rules of engagement. I do not believe in civilian non-combatants. I do believe that the fire bombing of Dresden was the right thing for the allies to do at the time.
Put yourself in other people's shoes. Engage those empathy circuits that have withered in your brain.
I simply can not empathize with Sharia Law, and how women are treated as second class citizens, not to be permitted to learn to read, stoned to death for being raped because there were not four male witnesses, and they have therefore committed adultery. I can not emphasize with the idea that they would attack civilians -- "People of the Book", to use the Prophet Muhammad's words to refer to the people in Paris.
I can not abide that they continue to deny their own people their rights, under The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Having empathy for a serial killer doesn't mean you let him go on killing.
In case you hadn't noticed, you are advocating biological warfare against a whole group of people, most of whom are innocent of any wrongdoing, which really means you need to work on the empathy thing.
I'm advocating taking the gloves off, and treating this as a case of "total warfare".
These guys aren't going away; they aren't stopping; they aren't achieving their goals; the goals they've publicly stated are irrational; they refuse to budge from their irrationalaty.
In other words: they are an implacable foe.
If not (fairly selectively) targeted biowarfare, how do you *personally* suggest we implement the modern day equivalent of the Romans destroying the city, and plowing salt into the fields after the battle of Carthage, or William Tecumseh Sherman's "march to the sea", in which he destroyed literally *everything* between Atlanta and Savannah Georgia.
How do *you* suggest we end their aggressions, permanently?
That's a serious question.
My way would have collateral damage, but would work, and could be targeted on a tribe-by-tribe basis. Make it Y-linked as well, if you think that the women are non-combatants, and should be spared.
Again: How do *you* suggest we end their aggressions, permanently?
So you didn't read a single thing I wrote.
You said specifically "Everything that needs to be done can be done by robots, once you engineers get them up to speed."
That is saying "you engineers have not sufficiently advanced robotics".
This is the same vantage point from which PETA and other less radical animal rights groups, which unlike PETA, do not capture peoples house pets and euthanize them take with regard to computer modeling for drug testing.
Either they are ignorant of the state of computer modeling from watching too much CSI, and have no idea of the limitations on the capabilities of computers, and the fact that computational biology is not advanced enough to model entire organisms, let alone the organs and other components that would be impacted by a new drug... Or they don't care (most of them fall into this bucket).
We can brute force the problem *NOW*, or we can wait until some mythical future in which robotics is advanced enough that we can magically gloss over all the current difficulties that are preventing the magical robots from being out in the OORT cloud, self-replicating as we speak, and sending us bundles of mana from heaven as we speak.
In other words, you are making solving the problem *contingent* on some *arbitrary*, and, quite frankly, *asinine* set of requirements that you've pulled out of your posterior, and using that as an excuse as to why you are standing there as a wart on the tail of progress, telling everyone who might fund our brute force efforts "it can't be done".
Well, thank you very much, Mr. Charles Holland Duell, but you can go jump in a lake and get the hell out of our way.