Iraq is not the old west; it's not some lawless place where there are no rules and no jurisdiction. Iraqi criminal law applies, just as it always has. They have courts and everything, as a part of the Iraqi Interim Authority.
If a security contractor shoots an Iraqi, he'll have to answer to the Iraqi police and the Iraqi courts.
Citigroup isn't just a bank. It owns stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. In addition to their consumer banking and credit card businesses, they also own CitiCapital and a very large investment bank.
The idea that Citigroup owns a terabuck worth of stuff doesn't surprise me one bit.
Would you call the rent-a-cop who patrols the grounds of your kid's elementary school after dark a "mercenary?"
Because that's basically what we're dealing with here. Ex-police or ex-military guys who went into private security. They security guards and bodyguards, most of whom went to Iraq because it's a great way to make extra money. Some guards are getting paid as much as $10,000 a month to provide personal security for guys like Ambassador Bremer and his senior staff, and VIP's.
I know you probably feel better if you dehumanize these poor guys. I know it's harder to hate them if you're aware that they're just ordinary guys trying to make a living by, for the most part, just being big and looking intimidating. I know it's easier for you if you demonize them and think of them as evil mercenaries who would kill their own grandmothers if the price were right. Believe me, I understand this.
But it still doesn't make you any less of a fucking asshole.
Remember your high-school biology? Men almost always continue producing sperm throughout their lives, barring some kind of organic trouble. Women stop producing ova, but men continue producing sperm.
But men, at a certain, ill-defined age, do stop responding to sexual signals as consistently or completely as they used to. Hence, Viagra.
European and Arab news agencies have been reporting the same abuses since the Red Cross released a scathing report 8 months ago.
It's bad enough if you believe lies; it's far worse to repeat them.
The official policy of the ICRC is that reports are not made public, and no comment on the conditions of prisoners under ICRC observation is ever made to the media or anybody else.
The Red Cross never released any reports.
An alleged report has been leaked; the consensus of opinion among those who I work for is that this report has been severely doctored by whomever released it to the Arab press.
Arab news organizations have reported extensively on US troops destroying and stealing things in Iraqi homes during search missions.
What you mean to say is, "Arab news organizations have asserted without providing any evidence at all." They're just making stuff up left and right, but because they've got press passes, naive people believe them.
US news also hasn't covered the closings of anti-US publications in Iraq (which set off the current Najaf situation).
The Coalition shut down one newspaper, a weekly called Al-Hawza. It was shut down because it published articles telling its readers to kill Coalition authorities and Iraqi police officers. It was shut down for 60 days, and is due to re-open at the end of the month.
These are the kinds of stories that the Arab world sees every day.
Yes. These are the very lies that Al-Jazeera spews.
What report? According to the Red Cross, any communication on the treatment of prisoners is considered sensitive material, and is not made available to the public.
The complaints didn't have an effect.
What complaints?
The eye witness accounts didn't have an effect.
What eye-witness accounts?
A few pictures change everything.
What change? Remember, the soldiers pictured had already been held over for an Article 32 hearing (an official investigation, kinda-sorta similar to a grand jury in civilian criminal law, only not really) before 60 Minutes made with the shock and awe.
The pictures changed nothing but public opinion. The public opinion shifted from the false position that every Iraqi prisoner was being treated equally and well to the equally false position that every Iraqi prisoner is being hideously tortured.
Which actually says quite a bit about the power of photography. Not to illustrate; everybody who thinks about it for half a second realizes that photographs are not good illustrations of large-scale situations or events. I'm talking about the power to misdirect and mislead.
Ten thousand guys being detained under strict procedure. Ten of them undergo improper treatment. Take a polaroid of those ten and suddenly BAM! You've got front-page news of what is, in perspective, a very small event.
I suspect, too, that since nuclear wapons are primarily offensive, rather than defensive
Swing and a miss.
Modern military doctrine calls for the use of nuclear weapons in a defensive capacity. The offensive uses of nuclear weapons are quite limited.
Let's say it's 1985, and the Soviet tanks start pouring through the Fulda Gap in East Germany. What does NATO do? Why, stops them, of course. Through the application of no fewer than 108 nuclear-armed Pershing II intermediate-range missiles.
The offensive uses of nuclear weapons are primarily preemptive in nature; that is to say, they're "defensive before the fact." For example, if the Soviets were smart, they would have launched their SS-20's against NATO's Pershing II positions as part of their advance through East Germany. Technically that would have been an offensive use, but in practice it would have been a force-protection, i.e. defensive, move.
The book on the uses of nuclear weapons in war is written entirely in the subjunctive mood, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't been written.
100 years ago germ theory was more or less accepted and people knew how to avoid such diseases.
If you lived in Paris, or London, or Berlin, or New York, or San Francisco. But if you lived in a Hannibal or a Midland or a Bozeman, as the vast majority of Americans and Europeans did, you were out luck.
It's kind of difficult to provide proper medical suvervision to childbirth when things are blowing up around you.
No, it had more to do with childhood fevers than with the war. Besides, the infant mortality rate throughout the 1950's was about the same.
Having thumbed through a copy of Gray's Anatomy (first published in 1858) would help to know what was supposed to go where, but setting something as simple as an arm (as opposed to, say, a hip) could probably be done by feel.
You've evidently never broken a bone. And you've obviously never had to reduce one. You can't feel anything through the swelling.
Roentgen published his work on x-rays in 1896 and their medical applications were immediately apparent.
Which might have meant something if (1) sources of x-rays and (2) film were readily available. They weren't.
That would depend on your local culture and your diet, wouldn't it?
Not as much as you might think.
Unless you lived out on a farm in BFE, you lived in a city, along with just about everybody else in what we now called the industrialized world.
You have that backwards. A few hundred thousand people lived in what could be generously called cities. About two hundred million people lived in Europe and America. Where did that put them?
"Plaster of Paris" was first developed in the Eighteenth Century and was used to protect mending fractures at least as far back as before the American Civil War (which, by the way, happened before 1900).
Availability, my little friend. You're forgetting that plaster doesn't just fall from the sky. It has to be manufactured. Once manufactured, it has to be trucked to where you are. If you broke your arm, you'd have been far more likely to wear a rigid splint of wood and leather than a plaster cast. Unless you lived in Paris, of course.
You might be interested to know, by the way, that the plaster cast remained essentially unchanged between about 1852 and 1970, when fiberglass tape replaced plaster-saturated bandages. The only thing that changed during that 120-year period was availability, and it changed drastically.
Joseph Lister started the ball rolling on antiseptics in the 1860's.
That doesn't mean betadine magically appeared on shelves, you know.
It still sounds like you're confusing "fracture" with "gunshot wound."
I'm pretty sure I'm clear on the difference.
What, were people getting amputations left and right that there was that much blood on the floor?
Have you ever witnessed an amputation? There's a truly startling amount of blood in an arm, and a shocking amount in a leg. These days the standard of care is to tightly wrap the limb to be amputated to force as much blood as possible out of the tissues before applying the tourniquet, but it's still an astonishing sight.
Let me see if I can't sum this up: as little as 100 years ago, life was fucking tough compared to how we live today. It was much harder to stay alive, and much harder to stay healthy. Only in the last 100 years or so has it become the norm for a person to live his whole life without suffering a crippling trauma or dying from an infectious disease.
Viagra enables a man to reproduce far past the point where he would normally stop responding to sexual stimulus. Only moderately wealthy people can afford Viagra. Basically we're selecting for wealth. Not secondarily, not incidentally, but primarily. If you can buy the pill, you can reproduce.
Chimps don't hunt each other to extinction for the very same reason.
Chimps, and the other primates, have evolved a very complex system of dominance that usually--usually!--obviates the need for murder. A chimp when challenged by a more dominant member of the species will cringe and retreat.
Human beings, ironically, generally seem to lack this trait. People, when challenged, tend to return the challenge rather than accepting a subservient social role.
Killing them off may sound reasonable until you do it and only then discover that the festering, disease-inviting garbage that you left on the sidewalk doesn't empty itself in the landfill.
So, wait. Let me get this straight. Human beings need to get along because we need somebody to pick up our garbage for us?
And Wal-Mart isn't near the biggest company in the world.
Actually, Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world. With sales in excess of 200 billion dollars, Wal-Mart tops the Fortune Global 500 list.
Now, if you choose to measure in terms of total company assets, the way Forbes does when they compile their Global 500 list, Citigroup wins. They've got assets worth over $1 trillion.
Personally, I've always been more interested in a company's gross revenue than their assets, so I go with the Fortune list. But that's just me. Others have a different opinion.
And civilization is deciding not to wipe out as many of your fellow human beings as possible, today.
Why? I, for one, would be a lot better off if about seven-tenths of the world's population were killed right this minute.
And I bet you would be, too.
The moral imperative is very strong, and that's a good thing. I'm morally opposed to killing people, and I hope you are too. (If nothing else, be pragmatic: be morally opposed to other people killing you, and then generalize.)
But let us not confuse the moral imperative with some natural process, or something inherent in ourselves or our society.
The natural state of being is for me to be trying as hard as possible to kill you all the time, and vice-versa. We choose not to do this because we've convinced ourselves that it's the right thing to do, not because of some exterior compulsion.
My impression was that barbers did these things until the 16th century or so.
Barbers did these things whenever doctors (and dentists!) were not available. That goes up to the early part of the 20th century, and even as late as the 19-teens in some rural parts of America and Europe.
World War I was bad in many ways, but it certainly did wonders to advance the state of the art in trauma medicine.
Incidentally, why barbers? Because they had the straight-razors, of course.
Most of the energy is released as heat. Or 'heat photons' if you like.
You're kidding, right?
Let's review. Heat is the term we apply to the average kinetic energy in the molecules in a given collection of matter. That collection might be in any phase; "heat" still applies to the kinetic energy of molecules or, in especially high-energy states, individual atoms, or even more elementary particles.
Photons are particles (Hi, my name is Isaac Newton) that convey the electromagnetic force.
Heat and photons are not related.
However, a barrage of photons of different wavelengths (Hi, my name is Christian Huygens) can change the temperature (i.e., the total heat, expressed in relative terms) of a given collection of matter.
The vast majority of the energy released by an uncontrolled nuclear reaction is released in the form of photons. Photons go "whoosh!" and interact with nearby matter, causing that matter to get really hot.
("Gamma rays" is merely the term we apply to photons with wavelengths in a certain range.)
It's extremely difficult to take seriously someone who believes that "modern civilization" began about 100 years ago. They must have had a lot of trouble arranging the Constitutional Convention or the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, what with all those jaguars wandering in and eating people.
Jaguars weren't a problem in the 1780's or the 1530's, but staph was. So were tuberculosis, tularemia, scurvy, plague, scarlet fever, pneumonia, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria.
Hell, we don't even have to go back 100 years. Today, the rate of infant mortality is about 8 per 1,000 live births. In the 1940's, just 60 years ago, it was nearly six times that.
Let's put it this way: throughout human history from about 300,000 years ago to just very recently, the leading causes of death have been trauma and infectious disease.
Only in the past century has the trend shifted. Today, the leading causes of death in the developed world are all chronic diseases: heart disease, diabetes, cancer. (Statistically, you're still quite likely to die from some kind of trauma, but if you look at all trauma, today you're far more likely to survive an injury that would have killed you even just 20 years ago. God bless the emergency room.)
Do you know what would happen to you if you broke your arm in 1900? Which, incidentally, you'd be far more likely to do, because you would have had far less calcium in your diet, and your bones would have been far weaker. If you broke your arm and you were very lucky, you would merely be crippled for life. Your barber--unless you were one of the relatively few people who lived in or very near a big city, your barber would be your sole source of medical assistance--would reduce the fracture badly, and the absence of anything like a cast would guarantee that it would not set properly. The result would be a permanent disability.
If you were slightly less lucky, your fracture would be a compound one. Your wound would get infected. Your barber would tie a piece of not-altogether-clean cloth around your upper arm, then use a short piece of wood to twist the cloth until it constricted your brachial artery. Then he would cut through the muscles, nerves, vessels, and ligaments in your arm until he reached the bone, and then saw through the bone. Meanwhile, you're unable to scream because you've got a piece of rawhide stuck in your mouth, and you're unable to reach out because three strong men are holding you down. The blood that was trapped in your arm spills out onto the sawdust-covered floor; later, that blood-soaked sawdust will be swept up, lofting whatever dire pathogens you might have been host to into the air.
Of course, if you were only slightly less lucky than that, you'd simply lapse into sepsis and die.
Don't be so arrogant. Only about four generations separate us from a standard of living that many of us would find to be just barely above proto-humans scrabbling around in the dust.
Absolutely right, but at what point do we decide that a weapon would be so powerful, there's no advantage to building or using it, because it would mean our own destruction too?
Never. There's always advantage in having a bigger weapon than your rival's. There are certainly circumstances where it's smarter to thump your chest and roar than to actually attack, but that doesn't enter into it.
You should always build the bigger weapon. Because if you don't, somebody else will.
Erm... no. Most of the energy of a nuclear reaction (either fission or fusion) is released as photons. These photons interact with things around the core, like the bomb casing and the first couple inches of air, to create kinetic and thermal energy.
I don't know exactly where your math went wrong, but it went wrong.
Don't overestimate the difficulty of building a working nuclear device. Remember: a small group of what were basically graduate students were able to build a city-buster bomb in the middle of a desert with access to only 1940's-era technology, and not really that much of it.
Go check out the satellite pictures of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan pre-November, 2001, and notice how similar they look, from a distance, to Los Alamos circa late 1944.
So I look at this debate over the efficacy of the Hafnium bomb and wonder to myself why it is that humans have this innate need to develop weapons that possess this much power.
You aren't really serious, are you?
Come on, guys. Let's progress beyond freshman seminar and start thinking about things, okay?
Those human beings who are presently living are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of culling. Before modern civilization, say 100 years ago or so, life was very hard. It was incredibly easy to fall off of a cliff, or get eaten by a jaguar, or get constipated and die.
The hard facts of life were exacerbated by the presence of other creatures competing for the same resources our ancestors needed to survive: food and water, mostly, but also the gonads of our fellow human beings. If there's a monkey in that tree, he's going to be able to get to the fruit before you can. If there's a jaguar lurking behind that rock, he's going to be able to get to the monkey. And if there's a human being who's better equipped to kill jaguars, he's going to be able to score more chicks. So great-great-etc.-granddad either responded by figuring out how to kill jaguars, or by figuring out how to kill humans who knew how to kill jaguars. Either one worked.
Think about it: you are the product of 15,000 successive generations of winners. Red in tooth and claw.
So, equipped with these facts, you are somehow surprised that people have a natural penchant for creating tools that give them a competitive advantage? Tools like spears and ovens and sunblock and Viagra and wheels and central heating and cruise missiles and the germ theory of medicine and mascara and shoes and the incandescent light bulb and hafnium bombs.
Use those great big brains, people. They're not just decoration for the top of your spinal cord, you know. Think.
Understand that human beings are competitive, and that competition includes devising tools to wipe out as many of your fellow human beings as possible. This is, to coin a phrase, "human nature."
I think your parent's theory is that the RIAA's member companies are trying to shut down iTunes while appearing to support it.
That's the part that's completely fucking insane. Either that, or colossally stupid. Not entirely sure which yet; don't really care.
They couldn't claim this if they simply went ahead and pulled their content off the iTMS catalog, as you suggest.
They don't have to! The RIAA membership doesn't "say" anything to anybody. They just sell their products in whatever ways they see fit.
What, you think they've concocted some kind of massive conspiracy to try to spin their PR to a market segment so insignificant that they have decided not to pursue it? Jesus, that's dumb.
Also, Twirlip, what's the deal with flaming your parent poster? I never knew you had this mean streak in you...:p
I have no patience for people who think they have some kind of insight but who in fact are just morons.
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If they shoot an Iraqi, who do they answer to?
Iraq is not the old west; it's not some lawless place where there are no rules and no jurisdiction. Iraqi criminal law applies, just as it always has. They have courts and everything, as a part of the Iraqi Interim Authority.
If a security contractor shoots an Iraqi, he'll have to answer to the Iraqi police and the Iraqi courts.
Citigroup isn't just a bank. It owns stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. In addition to their consumer banking and credit card businesses, they also own CitiCapital and a very large investment bank.
The idea that Citigroup owns a terabuck worth of stuff doesn't surprise me one bit.
Wow. That's gotta be some kind of record. Never have I had a post get down-moderated so fast.
Somebody out there must have been deeply, deeply offended by what I said.
Gee. I wonder who that could have been?
Would you call the rent-a-cop who patrols the grounds of your kid's elementary school after dark a "mercenary?"
Because that's basically what we're dealing with here. Ex-police or ex-military guys who went into private security. They security guards and bodyguards, most of whom went to Iraq because it's a great way to make extra money. Some guards are getting paid as much as $10,000 a month to provide personal security for guys like Ambassador Bremer and his senior staff, and VIP's.
I know you probably feel better if you dehumanize these poor guys. I know it's harder to hate them if you're aware that they're just ordinary guys trying to make a living by, for the most part, just being big and looking intimidating. I know it's easier for you if you demonize them and think of them as evil mercenaries who would kill their own grandmothers if the price were right. Believe me, I understand this.
But it still doesn't make you any less of a fucking asshole.
Remember your high-school biology? Men almost always continue producing sperm throughout their lives, barring some kind of organic trouble. Women stop producing ova, but men continue producing sperm.
But men, at a certain, ill-defined age, do stop responding to sexual signals as consistently or completely as they used to. Hence, Viagra.
European and Arab news agencies have been reporting the same abuses since the Red Cross released a scathing report 8 months ago.
It's bad enough if you believe lies; it's far worse to repeat them.
The official policy of the ICRC is that reports are not made public, and no comment on the conditions of prisoners under ICRC observation is ever made to the media or anybody else.
The Red Cross never released any reports.
An alleged report has been leaked; the consensus of opinion among those who I work for is that this report has been severely doctored by whomever released it to the Arab press.
Arab news organizations have reported extensively on US troops destroying and stealing things in Iraqi homes during search missions.
What you mean to say is, "Arab news organizations have asserted without providing any evidence at all." They're just making stuff up left and right, but because they've got press passes, naive people believe them.
US news also hasn't covered the closings of anti-US publications in Iraq (which set off the current Najaf situation).
The Coalition shut down one newspaper, a weekly called Al-Hawza. It was shut down because it published articles telling its readers to kill Coalition authorities and Iraqi police officers. It was shut down for 60 days, and is due to re-open at the end of the month.
These are the kinds of stories that the Arab world sees every day.
Yes. These are the very lies that Al-Jazeera spews.
The Red Cross report didn't have an effect.
What report? According to the Red Cross, any communication on the treatment of prisoners is considered sensitive material, and is not made available to the public.
The complaints didn't have an effect.
What complaints?
The eye witness accounts didn't have an effect.
What eye-witness accounts?
A few pictures change everything.
What change? Remember, the soldiers pictured had already been held over for an Article 32 hearing (an official investigation, kinda-sorta similar to a grand jury in civilian criminal law, only not really) before 60 Minutes made with the shock and awe.
The pictures changed nothing but public opinion. The public opinion shifted from the false position that every Iraqi prisoner was being treated equally and well to the equally false position that every Iraqi prisoner is being hideously tortured.
Which actually says quite a bit about the power of photography. Not to illustrate; everybody who thinks about it for half a second realizes that photographs are not good illustrations of large-scale situations or events. I'm talking about the power to misdirect and mislead.
Ten thousand guys being detained under strict procedure. Ten of them undergo improper treatment. Take a polaroid of those ten and suddenly BAM! You've got front-page news of what is, in perspective, a very small event.
Me: If you broke your arm, you'd have been far more likely to wear a rigid splint of wood and leather than a plaster cast.
:-)
You: You've completely fogotten about splints
Thou shalt read all of what thou repliest to. Barring that, thou shalt at least read all of what thou copy-and-pasteth.
So in this world, which is the mortality rate?
100%
Just give it time.
Where've you been, man? It's already happened. His name is Abdul Qadeer Khan. Google it.
I suspect, too, that since nuclear wapons are primarily offensive, rather than defensive
Swing and a miss.
Modern military doctrine calls for the use of nuclear weapons in a defensive capacity. The offensive uses of nuclear weapons are quite limited.
Let's say it's 1985, and the Soviet tanks start pouring through the Fulda Gap in East Germany. What does NATO do? Why, stops them, of course. Through the application of no fewer than 108 nuclear-armed Pershing II intermediate-range missiles.
The offensive uses of nuclear weapons are primarily preemptive in nature; that is to say, they're "defensive before the fact." For example, if the Soviets were smart, they would have launched their SS-20's against NATO's Pershing II positions as part of their advance through East Germany. Technically that would have been an offensive use, but in practice it would have been a force-protection, i.e. defensive, move.
The book on the uses of nuclear weapons in war is written entirely in the subjunctive mood, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't been written.
100 years ago germ theory was more or less accepted and people knew how to avoid such diseases.
If you lived in Paris, or London, or Berlin, or New York, or San Francisco. But if you lived in a Hannibal or a Midland or a Bozeman, as the vast majority of Americans and Europeans did, you were out luck.
It's kind of difficult to provide proper medical suvervision to childbirth when things are blowing up around you.
No, it had more to do with childhood fevers than with the war. Besides, the infant mortality rate throughout the 1950's was about the same.
Having thumbed through a copy of Gray's Anatomy (first published in 1858) would help to know what was supposed to go where, but setting something as simple as an arm (as opposed to, say, a hip) could probably be done by feel.
You've evidently never broken a bone. And you've obviously never had to reduce one. You can't feel anything through the swelling.
Roentgen published his work on x-rays in 1896 and their medical applications were immediately apparent.
Which might have meant something if (1) sources of x-rays and (2) film were readily available. They weren't.
That would depend on your local culture and your diet, wouldn't it?
Not as much as you might think.
Unless you lived out on a farm in BFE, you lived in a city, along with just about everybody else in what we now called the industrialized world.
You have that backwards. A few hundred thousand people lived in what could be generously called cities. About two hundred million people lived in Europe and America. Where did that put them?
"Plaster of Paris" was first developed in the Eighteenth Century and was used to protect mending fractures at least as far back as before the American Civil War (which, by the way, happened before 1900).
Availability, my little friend. You're forgetting that plaster doesn't just fall from the sky. It has to be manufactured. Once manufactured, it has to be trucked to where you are. If you broke your arm, you'd have been far more likely to wear a rigid splint of wood and leather than a plaster cast. Unless you lived in Paris, of course.
You might be interested to know, by the way, that the plaster cast remained essentially unchanged between about 1852 and 1970, when fiberglass tape replaced plaster-saturated bandages. The only thing that changed during that 120-year period was availability, and it changed drastically.
Joseph Lister started the ball rolling on antiseptics in the 1860's.
That doesn't mean betadine magically appeared on shelves, you know.
It still sounds like you're confusing "fracture" with "gunshot wound."
I'm pretty sure I'm clear on the difference.
What, were people getting amputations left and right that there was that much blood on the floor?
Have you ever witnessed an amputation? There's a truly startling amount of blood in an arm, and a shocking amount in a leg. These days the standard of care is to tightly wrap the limb to be amputated to force as much blood as possible out of the tissues before applying the tourniquet, but it's still an astonishing sight.
Let me see if I can't sum this up: as little as 100 years ago, life was fucking tough compared to how we live today. It was much harder to stay alive, and much harder to stay healthy. Only in the last 100 years or so has it become the norm for a person to live his whole life without suffering a crippling trauma or dying from an infectious disease.
Don't get too comfy.
Viagra enables a man to reproduce far past the point where he would normally stop responding to sexual stimulus. Only moderately wealthy people can afford Viagra. Basically we're selecting for wealth. Not secondarily, not incidentally, but primarily. If you can buy the pill, you can reproduce.
Interesting, no?
Chimps don't hunt each other to extinction for the very same reason.
Chimps, and the other primates, have evolved a very complex system of dominance that usually--usually!--obviates the need for murder. A chimp when challenged by a more dominant member of the species will cringe and retreat.
Human beings, ironically, generally seem to lack this trait. People, when challenged, tend to return the challenge rather than accepting a subservient social role.
Killing them off may sound reasonable until you do it and only then discover that the festering, disease-inviting garbage that you left on the sidewalk doesn't empty itself in the landfill.
So, wait. Let me get this straight. Human beings need to get along because we need somebody to pick up our garbage for us?
And so, I'd like to belive I know something about matter-radiation interactions, given that that's mostly what physical chemistry is about.
I'd like so too. Only trouble is, it doesn't seem to be the case.
And Wal-Mart isn't near the biggest company in the world.
Actually, Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world. With sales in excess of 200 billion dollars, Wal-Mart tops the Fortune Global 500 list.
Now, if you choose to measure in terms of total company assets, the way Forbes does when they compile their Global 500 list, Citigroup wins. They've got assets worth over $1 trillion.
Personally, I've always been more interested in a company's gross revenue than their assets, so I go with the Fortune list. But that's just me. Others have a different opinion.
And civilization is deciding not to wipe out as many of your fellow human beings as possible, today.
Why? I, for one, would be a lot better off if about seven-tenths of the world's population were killed right this minute.
And I bet you would be, too.
The moral imperative is very strong, and that's a good thing. I'm morally opposed to killing people, and I hope you are too. (If nothing else, be pragmatic: be morally opposed to other people killing you, and then generalize.)
But let us not confuse the moral imperative with some natural process, or something inherent in ourselves or our society.
The natural state of being is for me to be trying as hard as possible to kill you all the time, and vice-versa. We choose not to do this because we've convinced ourselves that it's the right thing to do, not because of some exterior compulsion.
My impression was that barbers did these things until the 16th century or so.
Barbers did these things whenever doctors (and dentists!) were not available. That goes up to the early part of the 20th century, and even as late as the 19-teens in some rural parts of America and Europe.
World War I was bad in many ways, but it certainly did wonders to advance the state of the art in trauma medicine.
Incidentally, why barbers? Because they had the straight-razors, of course.
Most of the energy is released as heat. Or 'heat photons' if you like.
You're kidding, right?
Let's review. Heat is the term we apply to the average kinetic energy in the molecules in a given collection of matter. That collection might be in any phase; "heat" still applies to the kinetic energy of molecules or, in especially high-energy states, individual atoms, or even more elementary particles.
Photons are particles (Hi, my name is Isaac Newton) that convey the electromagnetic force.
Heat and photons are not related.
However, a barrage of photons of different wavelengths (Hi, my name is Christian Huygens) can change the temperature (i.e., the total heat, expressed in relative terms) of a given collection of matter.
The vast majority of the energy released by an uncontrolled nuclear reaction is released in the form of photons. Photons go "whoosh!" and interact with nearby matter, causing that matter to get really hot.
("Gamma rays" is merely the term we apply to photons with wavelengths in a certain range.)
It's extremely difficult to take seriously someone who believes that "modern civilization" began about 100 years ago. They must have had a lot of trouble arranging the Constitutional Convention or the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, what with all those jaguars wandering in and eating people.
Jaguars weren't a problem in the 1780's or the 1530's, but staph was. So were tuberculosis, tularemia, scurvy, plague, scarlet fever, pneumonia, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria.
Hell, we don't even have to go back 100 years. Today, the rate of infant mortality is about 8 per 1,000 live births. In the 1940's, just 60 years ago, it was nearly six times that.
Let's put it this way: throughout human history from about 300,000 years ago to just very recently, the leading causes of death have been trauma and infectious disease.
Only in the past century has the trend shifted. Today, the leading causes of death in the developed world are all chronic diseases: heart disease, diabetes, cancer. (Statistically, you're still quite likely to die from some kind of trauma, but if you look at all trauma, today you're far more likely to survive an injury that would have killed you even just 20 years ago. God bless the emergency room.)
Do you know what would happen to you if you broke your arm in 1900? Which, incidentally, you'd be far more likely to do, because you would have had far less calcium in your diet, and your bones would have been far weaker. If you broke your arm and you were very lucky, you would merely be crippled for life. Your barber--unless you were one of the relatively few people who lived in or very near a big city, your barber would be your sole source of medical assistance--would reduce the fracture badly, and the absence of anything like a cast would guarantee that it would not set properly. The result would be a permanent disability.
If you were slightly less lucky, your fracture would be a compound one. Your wound would get infected. Your barber would tie a piece of not-altogether-clean cloth around your upper arm, then use a short piece of wood to twist the cloth until it constricted your brachial artery. Then he would cut through the muscles, nerves, vessels, and ligaments in your arm until he reached the bone, and then saw through the bone. Meanwhile, you're unable to scream because you've got a piece of rawhide stuck in your mouth, and you're unable to reach out because three strong men are holding you down. The blood that was trapped in your arm spills out onto the sawdust-covered floor; later, that blood-soaked sawdust will be swept up, lofting whatever dire pathogens you might have been host to into the air.
Of course, if you were only slightly less lucky than that, you'd simply lapse into sepsis and die.
Don't be so arrogant. Only about four generations separate us from a standard of living that many of us would find to be just barely above proto-humans scrabbling around in the dust.
Absolutely right, but at what point do we decide that a weapon would be so powerful, there's no advantage to building or using it, because it would mean our own destruction too?
Never. There's always advantage in having a bigger weapon than your rival's. There are certainly circumstances where it's smarter to thump your chest and roar than to actually attack, but that doesn't enter into it.
You should always build the bigger weapon. Because if you don't, somebody else will.
Erm... no. Most of the energy of a nuclear reaction (either fission or fusion) is released as photons. These photons interact with things around the core, like the bomb casing and the first couple inches of air, to create kinetic and thermal energy.
I don't know exactly where your math went wrong, but it went wrong.
Don't overestimate the difficulty of building a working nuclear device. Remember: a small group of what were basically graduate students were able to build a city-buster bomb in the middle of a desert with access to only 1940's-era technology, and not really that much of it.
Go check out the satellite pictures of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan pre-November, 2001, and notice how similar they look, from a distance, to Los Alamos circa late 1944.
So I look at this debate over the efficacy of the Hafnium bomb and wonder to myself why it is that humans have this innate need to develop weapons that possess this much power.
You aren't really serious, are you?
Come on, guys. Let's progress beyond freshman seminar and start thinking about things, okay?
Those human beings who are presently living are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of culling. Before modern civilization, say 100 years ago or so, life was very hard. It was incredibly easy to fall off of a cliff, or get eaten by a jaguar, or get constipated and die.
The hard facts of life were exacerbated by the presence of other creatures competing for the same resources our ancestors needed to survive: food and water, mostly, but also the gonads of our fellow human beings. If there's a monkey in that tree, he's going to be able to get to the fruit before you can. If there's a jaguar lurking behind that rock, he's going to be able to get to the monkey. And if there's a human being who's better equipped to kill jaguars, he's going to be able to score more chicks. So great-great-etc.-granddad either responded by figuring out how to kill jaguars, or by figuring out how to kill humans who knew how to kill jaguars. Either one worked.
Think about it: you are the product of 15,000 successive generations of winners. Red in tooth and claw.
So, equipped with these facts, you are somehow surprised that people have a natural penchant for creating tools that give them a competitive advantage? Tools like spears and ovens and sunblock and Viagra and wheels and central heating and cruise missiles and the germ theory of medicine and mascara and shoes and the incandescent light bulb and hafnium bombs.
Use those great big brains, people. They're not just decoration for the top of your spinal cord, you know. Think.
Understand that human beings are competitive, and that competition includes devising tools to wipe out as many of your fellow human beings as possible. This is, to coin a phrase, "human nature."
I think your parent's theory is that the RIAA's member companies are trying to shut down iTunes while appearing to support it.
:p
That's the part that's completely fucking insane. Either that, or colossally stupid. Not entirely sure which yet; don't really care.
They couldn't claim this if they simply went ahead and pulled their content off the iTMS catalog, as you suggest.
They don't have to! The RIAA membership doesn't "say" anything to anybody. They just sell their products in whatever ways they see fit.
What, you think they've concocted some kind of massive conspiracy to try to spin their PR to a market segment so insignificant that they have decided not to pursue it? Jesus, that's dumb.
Also, Twirlip, what's the deal with flaming your parent poster? I never knew you had this mean streak in you...
I have no patience for people who think they have some kind of insight but who in fact are just morons.