But we don't need full 24/7 coverage of every piece of the conflict. And in my personal opinion, the most recent set of disclosures crossed that line.
It would be one thing if we were doing something like WWII here - fighting for our own survival. But we're not. We're spending a bunch of money we don't have, getting a bunch of our own people killed, and only God knows how many Afghans killed, fighting a war that is essentially useless. No one realistically thinks that we're going to transform Afghanistan into a model of peace and democracy no matter what we do. No one thinks that if we just left Afghanistan tomorrow, our national security would be affected in any way whatsoever. Given that, yes, I think this war needs to be shoved in America's face every day, 24/7. This is what we're buying with our tax dollars and the blood of our soldiers. We're killing a bunch of guys who hate us, but live in caves and have no realistic capability to do anything to us. Plus blowing up wedding parties, schools, etc, etc. Yes, most of our operations are going correctly and not killing civillians. But the number of civilians it's OK to kill when there's no threat to you? That would be zero. America needs to see these images, over and over and over.
Not an intel officer here, but I used to work with them fairly closely. I seriously doubt the Taliban has an intel cell capable of doing these kinds of logic puzzles, because in real life it's a lot harder than you've presented it here - it's actually quite difficult to know what you know. Getting all these pieces of the puzzle (informants A, B, and C had certain knowledge at certain times; no one else could have known; A's schedule was this, B was that, C was something else, and the NATO intel officer was in town on this date; etc) all assembled is actually quite difficult. And the easy solution - just shoot all three - is not so good either. The Taliban has already alienated huge swaths of the population and the amount of random killing this would entail is probably not to palatable to their leadership anymore.
As a non-American citizen, Assange has no particular obligation to attend to the defense of the US. Calling him a traitor is simply a false accusation.
Its been widely reported the Taliban have long tracked down informants and collaborators. They are frequently picked up, tortured for days at a time, horribly murdered and frequently beheaded. Its not uncommon for them to then simply murder the entire family afterwards. They then repeat with any names they were able to torture out of the poor fellow.
Right, the Taliban does all this stuff, but they themselves are blameless. In fact, all these deaths are really Assange's fault. Please. The Taliban is going to go around murdering people regardless of any information released at Wikileaks.
Assange-bashers need to pick an argument. Either the information he released is old news (in which case it was also old news to the Taliban), or it wasn't. And if there really are new revelations of misconduct by the US Armed forces there, then he was right to release the data. You can't go around insisting both that there was no cause to release it AND that it was horribly threatening to Afghan informers.
It's called progressive taxation, and it's been a foundational principal of our tax system since the income tax was invented. And that's as it should be. Rich people get proportionally more out of a functioning society than poor people do by definition, and should pay proportionally more. Think about it this way: if society collapsed tomorrow, who would stand to lose more: Bill Gates? Or the bum sleeping under the overpass? Having a livable society requires paying taxes, and rich people should pay proportionally more of them.
Doing nothing when North Korea runs missile tests is "better" than before?
Doing "nothing" is pretty much the same policy the Bush administration had in the same situation, so... not better than before, but no worse.
Wasting money suing states that try to get a handle on the illegal alien problem
That's one way to look at it. Or you could be truthful and acknowledge that Arizona's attempt to "get a handle on the illegal alien problem" really amounts to nothing more than "discriminating against people who look like they might be Mexican". That's really all there is to it. In fact, most law enforcement organizations in Arizona (with the notable exception of the notorious Maricopa county sheriff) were opposed to the bill, because it put their law officers in an impossible situation - they had to try to decide whether someone was likely to be an illegal immigrant based purely on their appearance - leaving the law officers a choice between effectively ignoring the law, or exposing themselves and their departments vulnerable to discrimination lawsuits.
Gutting the part of the Justice Department that prosecutes abuse of law concerning monopolistic business practices, in order to ratchet up frivolous [note: probably not so frivolous to those folks whose civil rights are being infringed] "civil rights" prosecutions, is "better" than before?
You mean, better than the previous administration's policy of gutting both monopoly enforcement AND civil rights enforcement (and worker safety enforcement and environmental enforcement and... I could go on). Yes.
We are seeing this in many countries already, shifting their holdings to the Euro. as fewer are willing to purchase US Treasuries
That's not even remotely true. In fact, money has been FLOODING into US Treasury securities. Borrowing costs for the US have declined for year term investments to like a quarter of a percent, and even for long-term (30 year) bonds, the government still only has to offer 4% interest. This meants that the bond markets are not taking seriously the idea that the US government is borrowing too much money and inflation is going to come roaring back.
Who the hell cares what Larry Ellison thinks about this matter? Is he on HP's board? Is he a major HP investor? No? Then, Larry, STFU.
Also, sure, he was cleared of the harassment charge. He wasn't, however, cleared of the charge that he freaking stole $20k from the company by using fraudulent travel claims. I really can't see that this qualifies as the outrage of the week.
You just put up a completely ludicrous feminist-bashing post, with little ground in reality, and then got a flamebait mod? You could knock me over with a feather.
And thanks to feminists running around claiming that no woman has ever lied about being raped or sexually harassed
[Citation needed]. Please, do tell. Quote me a "feminist" who's running around claiming that no woman has ever lied about this sort of thing. That's all right, I'll wait.
there is pretty much a presumption of guilt now for any such accusation,
This is hardly limited to sexual harassment/rape cases - most people reflexively think that people accused of ANYTHING are probably guilty. There's a reason why grand jury proceedings are secret.
plus refining would be easier as the asteroids have far higher concentrations of valuable minerals
Right. Except for the part about the asteroid being millions of miles away. You need to think harder about the costs involved. There's no way you're sending an entire factory to the asteroid belt, accomplishing the mining and refining, and getting the finished product back to earth for $10B. Consider that building an aircraft carrier (on earth) costs $5B. A space factory is going to cost at least that much just to build. Then you have to get it there (presumably in pieces) and assemble it. Then, most expensive of all, you need operators, and paying for all the life support, food, danger pay, transport, etc, etc is really going to set you back. No need to even discuss automated mining operations, as such technology doesn't exist and isn't likely to soon.
Bottom line: there's a reason why no private companies are chomping at the bit to go mine asteroids. No one can figure out how to make any money.
But this giant colonization project would require astronomical (so to speak) sums of money, and really - why should we reduce our quality of life now to buy a few more years far, far in the future?
... of being semi-reasonable. But an important point to consider: we're not actually doing any of this stuff now, although we could. Why? Answer: it's not cost-effective to live this way. And in any reasonable scenario, establishing colonies on Mars is going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than colonizing, say, the Gobi desert.
If we live on multiple planets/moons/space stations, then any one disaster would have to be truly fantastic in scope (enormous gamma ray burst large enough to wipe out a large area of space) to take out all of us at the same time.
A disaster on Earth would have to be truly fantastic in scope to take us all out at the same time, too. As someone pointed out above, Earth could get hit by an asteroid the size of the Yucatan impactor and still be WAY more hospitable than Mars. In fact, any impact short of breaking the planet into pieces would STILL leave it more hospitable than Mars. So tell me again why we need to do this?
When we're talking about the unimaginably huge sums of money it would cost to establish a colony in space, "shortsightedness" makes perfect sense. It would be a substantial impact on our current quality of life, and it's highly unlikely that any of our near descendants would see any benefit. So why should we sacrifice for distant descendants, who may not even be the same species as us by that time?
If I were Greedy enough I would form a group of people who are just as greedy as me to move to Mars and mine for materials.
What minerals would you mine? How would you mine and refine them? How would you (profitably) get them to market? Who would finance your expedition? Bear in mind that Mars is for the most part made up of the same materials as earth - various iron oxides, silicates, etc.
People like to talk about exploiting other bodies in the solar system for their supposed mineral wealth, but I can't imagine a way you could do it profitably.
f Armstrong reported back from Applo 11 he saw precious gems the size of beach balls we'd had bases on The Moon long ago. If Viking 1 and Viking 2 turned on their cameras and saw the ground was litered gold and silver we'd have bases there too.
Someone on here did the math on this kind of thing awhile ago (can't find the link now). It turns out that using reasonable values for the costs of transportation to and from Mars, you couldn't, in fact, turn a profit even if Mars was littered with platinum ingots. But your underlying point is correct: there's no way for Earth to profit from economic activity in space (or we'd be doing it already). Which means that realistically, colonization isn't happening.
if we need that much lift capacity, we simply build that much lift capacity. As with energy, it's just an engineering problem.
Oh, got it. And we'll just send you the bill, ok? Because of course the real issue isn't engineering, it's economics. Why should currently living people expend huge amounts of money for this when neither they nor any of their near descendants are likely to see any benefits from it?
Sacrificing lots of our current taxpayer dollars to blast distantly related life-forms to other planets is roughly equivalent to leaving your fortune to someone else's dog. Why?
But wait a minute. Supposing we had descendants traveling around space a billion years from now. It is far from certain they would be recognizably human. They might not even be mammals.
Yes - at some point, our descendants aren't "us" anymore. Do we owe them anything? Particularly, are we required to significantly lower our own quality of life (and that of our more immediate descendants) for far-future post-humans? It's far from clear that we do.
So whether we leave or not, we're still all going to die eventually. So why not live for the moment? Particularly given that extra-solar system travel is all but certainly infeasible - we've got a few hundred million years before the sun starts to expire.
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It would be one thing if we were doing something like WWII here - fighting for our own survival. But we're not. We're spending a bunch of money we don't have, getting a bunch of our own people killed, and only God knows how many Afghans killed, fighting a war that is essentially useless. No one realistically thinks that we're going to transform Afghanistan into a model of peace and democracy no matter what we do. No one thinks that if we just left Afghanistan tomorrow, our national security would be affected in any way whatsoever. Given that, yes, I think this war needs to be shoved in America's face every day, 24/7. This is what we're buying with our tax dollars and the blood of our soldiers. We're killing a bunch of guys who hate us, but live in caves and have no realistic capability to do anything to us. Plus blowing up wedding parties, schools, etc, etc. Yes, most of our operations are going correctly and not killing civillians. But the number of civilians it's OK to kill when there's no threat to you? That would be zero. America needs to see these images, over and over and over.
No kidding. Everyone is swallowing this "hundreds (or even thousands) of Afghan informants are at risk" line. If there's such a list, where is it?
Not an intel officer here, but I used to work with them fairly closely. I seriously doubt the Taliban has an intel cell capable of doing these kinds of logic puzzles, because in real life it's a lot harder than you've presented it here - it's actually quite difficult to know what you know. Getting all these pieces of the puzzle (informants A, B, and C had certain knowledge at certain times; no one else could have known; A's schedule was this, B was that, C was something else, and the NATO intel officer was in town on this date; etc) all assembled is actually quite difficult. And the easy solution - just shoot all three - is not so good either. The Taliban has already alienated huge swaths of the population and the amount of random killing this would entail is probably not to palatable to their leadership anymore.
As a non-American citizen, Assange has no particular obligation to attend to the defense of the US. Calling him a traitor is simply a false accusation.
Right, the Taliban does all this stuff, but they themselves are blameless. In fact, all these deaths are really Assange's fault. Please. The Taliban is going to go around murdering people regardless of any information released at Wikileaks.
Assange-bashers need to pick an argument. Either the information he released is old news (in which case it was also old news to the Taliban), or it wasn't. And if there really are new revelations of misconduct by the US Armed forces there, then he was right to release the data. You can't go around insisting both that there was no cause to release it AND that it was horribly threatening to Afghan informers.
It's called progressive taxation, and it's been a foundational principal of our tax system since the income tax was invented. And that's as it should be. Rich people get proportionally more out of a functioning society than poor people do by definition, and should pay proportionally more. Think about it this way: if society collapsed tomorrow, who would stand to lose more: Bill Gates? Or the bum sleeping under the overpass? Having a livable society requires paying taxes, and rich people should pay proportionally more of them.
Doing "nothing" is pretty much the same policy the Bush administration had in the same situation, so... not better than before, but no worse.
That's one way to look at it. Or you could be truthful and acknowledge that Arizona's attempt to "get a handle on the illegal alien problem" really amounts to nothing more than "discriminating against people who look like they might be Mexican". That's really all there is to it. In fact, most law enforcement organizations in Arizona (with the notable exception of the notorious Maricopa county sheriff) were opposed to the bill, because it put their law officers in an impossible situation - they had to try to decide whether someone was likely to be an illegal immigrant based purely on their appearance - leaving the law officers a choice between effectively ignoring the law, or exposing themselves and their departments vulnerable to discrimination lawsuits.
You mean, better than the previous administration's policy of gutting both monopoly enforcement AND civil rights enforcement (and worker safety enforcement and environmental enforcement and... I could go on). Yes.
That's not even remotely true. In fact, money has been FLOODING into US Treasury securities. Borrowing costs for the US have declined for year term investments to like a quarter of a percent, and even for long-term (30 year) bonds, the government still only has to offer 4% interest. This meants that the bond markets are not taking seriously the idea that the US government is borrowing too much money and inflation is going to come roaring back.
Who the hell cares what Larry Ellison thinks about this matter? Is he on HP's board? Is he a major HP investor? No? Then, Larry, STFU.
Also, sure, he was cleared of the harassment charge. He wasn't, however, cleared of the charge that he freaking stole $20k from the company by using fraudulent travel claims. I really can't see that this qualifies as the outrage of the week.
You just put up a completely ludicrous feminist-bashing post, with little ground in reality, and then got a flamebait mod? You could knock me over with a feather.
[Citation needed]. Please, do tell. Quote me a "feminist" who's running around claiming that no woman has ever lied about this sort of thing. That's all right, I'll wait.
This is hardly limited to sexual harassment/rape cases - most people reflexively think that people accused of ANYTHING are probably guilty. There's a reason why grand jury proceedings are secret.
Right. Except for the part about the asteroid being millions of miles away. You need to think harder about the costs involved. There's no way you're sending an entire factory to the asteroid belt, accomplishing the mining and refining, and getting the finished product back to earth for $10B. Consider that building an aircraft carrier (on earth) costs $5B. A space factory is going to cost at least that much just to build. Then you have to get it there (presumably in pieces) and assemble it. Then, most expensive of all, you need operators, and paying for all the life support, food, danger pay, transport, etc, etc is really going to set you back. No need to even discuss automated mining operations, as such technology doesn't exist and isn't likely to soon.
Bottom line: there's a reason why no private companies are chomping at the bit to go mine asteroids. No one can figure out how to make any money.
But this giant colonization project would require astronomical (so to speak) sums of money, and really - why should we reduce our quality of life now to buy a few more years far, far in the future?
... of being semi-reasonable. But an important point to consider: we're not actually doing any of this stuff now, although we could. Why? Answer: it's not cost-effective to live this way. And in any reasonable scenario, establishing colonies on Mars is going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than colonizing, say, the Gobi desert.
It's not cost effective in Antarctica, yet it's somehow magically going to become MORE cost-effective on freaking Mars? How is that, exactly?
A disaster on Earth would have to be truly fantastic in scope to take us all out at the same time, too. As someone pointed out above, Earth could get hit by an asteroid the size of the Yucatan impactor and still be WAY more hospitable than Mars. In fact, any impact short of breaking the planet into pieces would STILL leave it more hospitable than Mars. So tell me again why we need to do this?
Why do I need to spend a lot of money to get life started on other planets? What are we getting out of it?
Once the earth has been engulfed by the sun, Mars ain't exactly going to be a resort town either. When the sun goes, we're done.
Why should I want to expend lots of resources that could be put to use for me or my immediate descendants on this? What am I getting out of it?
When we're talking about the unimaginably huge sums of money it would cost to establish a colony in space, "shortsightedness" makes perfect sense. It would be a substantial impact on our current quality of life, and it's highly unlikely that any of our near descendants would see any benefit. So why should we sacrifice for distant descendants, who may not even be the same species as us by that time?
What minerals would you mine? How would you mine and refine them? How would you (profitably) get them to market? Who would finance your expedition? Bear in mind that Mars is for the most part made up of the same materials as earth - various iron oxides, silicates, etc.
People like to talk about exploiting other bodies in the solar system for their supposed mineral wealth, but I can't imagine a way you could do it profitably.
Someone on here did the math on this kind of thing awhile ago (can't find the link now). It turns out that using reasonable values for the costs of transportation to and from Mars, you couldn't, in fact, turn a profit even if Mars was littered with platinum ingots. But your underlying point is correct: there's no way for Earth to profit from economic activity in space (or we'd be doing it already). Which means that realistically, colonization isn't happening.
Oh, got it. And we'll just send you the bill, ok? Because of course the real issue isn't engineering, it's economics. Why should currently living people expend huge amounts of money for this when neither they nor any of their near descendants are likely to see any benefits from it?
Sacrificing lots of our current taxpayer dollars to blast distantly related life-forms to other planets is roughly equivalent to leaving your fortune to someone else's dog. Why?
Yes - at some point, our descendants aren't "us" anymore. Do we owe them anything? Particularly, are we required to significantly lower our own quality of life (and that of our more immediate descendants) for far-future post-humans? It's far from clear that we do.
So whether we leave or not, we're still all going to die eventually. So why not live for the moment? Particularly given that extra-solar system travel is all but certainly infeasible - we've got a few hundred million years before the sun starts to expire.