Parent is more insightful than all the yapping brainwashed comments put together. I don't know if the U.S. was ever the best, but I do know it is now the worst. There is no difference between corporations and the evil gangs shown in Slumdog Millionaire taking advantage of small children and treating them worse than animals. Both exist for their own selfish, dog-eat-dog benefit without any regard whatsoever for the people who do the actual productive work. We have a government completely bought and paid for by these arrogant monsters. And the serfs cannot even imagine a life of freedom any more. There is nothing sadder than to see a serf embrace his serfdom and see it as natural.
Correctimundo, mon ami. Snopes.com has their typical glib treatment of this item which completely misses the point. Nowhere do they contest that the exam is in fact genuine. They prattle on about how the poor instructors and poor students today have to deal with courses which were absent in 1895. But they miss what is in fact the key consideration, which is that we have no idea what kind of curve they graded the exam on.
What is most instructive, however, remains: the questions asked were more difficult than what you find now. The CHALLENGE to the students' minds was greater.
And we have that little old item nagging at us: students in years past knew the difference between loose and lose. Even 10 years ago, students and graduates knew the difference much better than they do now.
My guess is that O.P.'s native language is English. I looked at a bunch of his posts, and he seems very fluent and adept. I think you will find O.P. is an example of a very intelligent and capable individual who is the product of a badly failed educational system (in this particular example, failed teaching of English language is noted). Hardly any memorization is taught any more. The rule that "oo" is pronounced as in "ooze" and "o" is pronounced as in "foe" is successfully taught, but the table of exceptions to the rule is not taught successfully at all. Judging by the results, it is not taught at all, or only very peremptorily. Geography and history are two other subjects the scope and quality of whose teaching has dropped to a very low ebb. I think you will find a far better quality of English teaching in India than in the U.S.
Admittedly we are both fixating on a single misspelling, but in the case of this particular single misspelling, what was for a great many years successfully taught, has in fairly recent years become almost universally not so. The word is misspelled almost as often as it is correctly spelled.
Check out the 8th grade final exam from 1895 from Salina, Kansas. This is just the grammar portion:
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters. 2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications. 3. Define verse, stanza, and paragraph. 4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principle parts of "lie," "play," and "run." 5. Define case; illustrate each case. 6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principle marks of punctuation. 7. Write a composition of 150 words and show therein that you understand the principle rules of grammar.
And a portion which was called "orthography:"
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication? 2. What are elementary sounds? How classified? 3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, and linguals? 4. Give four substitutes for caret "u." 5. Give two rules for spelling words with final "e." Name two exceptions under each rule. 6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each. 7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, and mono. 8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last. 9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays. 10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Even though the above does not much demonstrate very specific memorization, I believe it serves to make the point that standards have fallen very far. Not only could virtually no present day U.S. 8th grader pass that test, I submit few college seniors could; even those who major in journalism.
The geography section is also an eye opener:
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend? 2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas? 3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean? 4. Describe the mountains of North America. 5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco. 6. Name and locate the principle trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each. 7. Why is the Atlantic East coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude? 8. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers. 9. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inbclination of the earth.
Thank you for taking the time for your critique. The only objection I reject out of hand is your last. The very thing part three addresses is the absurd, towering, unmanageable structure of laws we have now. If the tax code will not bear renewal, I applaud loudly. This 44,000 page monstrosity is grotesquely and insultingly absurd and a pernicious evil on the face of it. It could all be replaced by about 10 pages of rational legislation. The true danger is that stuff would still get renewed too easily. All that would be required would be a resolution that 218 reps and 51 senators approve, which could be as simple as "the entire tax code stands." This resolution would take a minute and a half to draft and about 10 minutes to vote on. It only starts to take time if enough legislators insist on debate. And that would be a Good thing.
By the way, you should realize that the Senate cannot initiate revenue bills, and in practice also never initiates expenditure and appropriation bills. The Constitution enforces the former, and the House has the practical ability to enforce the latter. These are the most pernicious routes of corruption, and my single term House proposal addresses this.
As for the rest, you say "nothing would ever get passed" as if that's a bad thing:-) And when you ask, who would bother with a single term, my reply is "not the greedy power-hungry sort we end up with now."
The systemic greed and corruption started considerably before the 1950s. Some would put it dating as far back as the oldest attempts at human government. It was certainly established in the US considerably before the 1950s. Watch the movies Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It's A Wonderful Life, and others. There were no contemporary movies of the post Civil War reconstruction era, but if there had been, they would have shown the problem rampant by then.
I will, however, agree that it has never been worse than the present.
The problem is indicative of a fundamental weakness of the design of the US representational system. Only a tiny percentage of voters would vote for an imaginary resolution that said "All incumbents are hereby deemed re-elected," but a huge percentage will vote to re-elect their own incumbent. What is productive on the small scale (more pork for MY district/state) is counterproductive on the large scale (more uncontrolled, disastrous pork for everybody). They are voting in what they perceive to be their own interest, and arguably they are not wrong if their own interest is self centered and not so much centered on the nation as a whole. And that cannot just be criticized as stupid. The only real proponent of self is always self, and family and friends come before all. We wouldn't be human if it were otherwise.
It is not an easy problem to solve. Term limits weed out experience and wisdom as well as arrogance and corruption, and as well, most proposals allow much too long a term of incumbency to do the slightest good. Nevertheless, I have the solution. It will of course require Constitutional amendment.
Part one. Limit membership in the House of Representatives to a SINGLE two year term. Leave the Senate unfettered by any limits. In fact, restore the method of choosing Senators to the original one of appointment by the governor (for 6 year terms just as now). Now you have the perfect Congress. The House is made over COMPLETELY fresh every two years; corruption never has a chance to take hold, no representative ever has to waste time and concentration on pursuing re-election rather than tending to governing, and you perpetually have that wonderful breath of fresh air that is the freshman class. On the other hand, the Senate fulfills what has always been its purpose: the repository of experience and wisdom. Senators likewise do not have to politic all the time, worrying about their re-election, since they are appointed.
You still have a democratic process, since no one can become a representative without being elected in the first place, and the governor in appointing the state's senators is answerable to the people, since he is popularly elected.
Part two: end the corrupt Congressional committee system which is at the root of corrupt legislation. Replace the committees by groups chosen from the general population including various appropriate professions. This mimics the proven jury system in the judicial branch. These groups will be freshly chosen every two years. No, it doesn't GUARANTEE that their fruits will be brilliant, but it does keep politics out of this critical process.
Part three: sunset EVERY bill. No exceptions.
The three part combination is the best possible solution. No hare brained bill can get passed without passing both houses, including the people's committees, and all bills die if not renewed. So-called "entitlements" cease unless they continually prove themselves and are constantly renewed. The system is self healing, since you can at any time get a fresh slate if everyone can't agree on the current system of laws, and they all sunset automatically. Of course, this extreme case will never happen, but it is the best guarantee against tyranny. The solution does not depend on the supposed adversarial relationship of the two parties, which has become illusory in the present general corruption. Rather, the solution is guaranteed by design.
Listen up. The post I originally replied to called the people liars for saying they paid $1500 for a Macbook. I demonstrated that you can easily pay $1500 - and in fact a whole lot more - for a Macbook. That's all. I didn't compare anything to anything. Prattle on if you must. ou're not proving anything.
MacBook $999 4GB RAM $100 500GB drive $150 iWork $49 Microsoft Office home and student $129.95 AppleCare $249 Total $1,676.95
I see you're using the academic login. How can I do that; I'm not a student. I clearly stated in the original post you can take the academic discount off the total. What do I find REALLY amusing? They're actually charging academics MORE for the RAM:-)
How do I know? I could name some reasons, and I'm tempted to do so, but the objection is silly. You want to change $1676.95 to $1627.95, delete iWork. Big deal. It doesn't change the point. Try to see the point.
Stop calling them either liars or idiots. You are the one who is way off. Take a Macbook, expand it from 2GB to 4GB, change the 250GB drive to 500GB, add iWork, add Microsoft Office home and student edition, and add Applecare because now you've got quite a lot riding on a measly 1 year warranty. You're looking at $1676.95. And that's without Aperture, Logic Express, Final Cut, Filemaker, no DVI adapter, and no airline adapter. Just that stuff will take you up to $2491.90, and that's the CHEAP version of Filemaker.
So, $1500.00 is easily reached with the bottom of the line Macbook, even with a 15% discount.
You're right. The guy is an a LOSER. He writes like a loser, he uses a loser's operating system, and he doesn't know shit technically. He symbolizes the problem perfectly.
Huh, a music CD is a sequence of digitally encoded sectors, one after the other, with error detection and correction. Ripping it to disk files, computer performance should be TOTALLY IRRELEVANT on the face of it. Maybe if you used a half decent ripping tool... CDDA Paranoia . Of course, that tool only runs on a real operating system... linux.
1) The aircraft carriers are to project ground attack aircraft onto the beach during the invasion. You need them on site, not airfields hundreds of miles away. I can't think of a successful amphibious invasion that didn't involve heavy air superiority from very close to the beach. 2) I can't find Soviet naval strength in 1945 anywhere. What I could find was the figures for 1941, and some fragmentary information indicating they hadn't built many ships at all larger than destroyers in the interrim. 3) Japanese naval resources in 1945 were all but destroyed. They did have plenty of ground aircraft left, though, including kamikazes, and plenty of land based artillery. There did not need to be a naval battle; there needed to be an almighty air and gunfire support of the invasion, and that would have taken a gigantic naval force on the assaulting side. 4) The Soviets had zero experience with mounting seaborne invasions and as far as I can tell they had no landing craft.
It's not that the Soviets could never have invaded Japan, it's that the idea of them doing it in August 1945 or any time in 1945 or even 1946 is pure fantasy.
Well, if the carnage remains or intensifies after this month, that will show that it is not about the foreign invaders and never was. It's about embracing the 13th century over the 21st century that the real world is living in.
Oh, and here's what we end up with for our efforts and our dead. Muqtada al-Sadr, the influential Iranian supported insane religious nut hate monger, is withdrawing his so-called "support" for the current Nouri al-Maliki compromise government. We will have exchanged a fairly dangerous hateful sectarian dictatorship for an extremely dangerous hateful totalitarian religious madhouse insanity like the ones in Iran and other such hellholes. You remember, the general type of scum who were actually behind 9-11. Not the Iraqis as they were.
The US has had a long sequence of stupid and ineffectual presidents with little substantive difference between the two sides of the aisle. And so it continues.
You do understand that one man's "troll" is another man's refusal to tolerate incompetence and sloppiness? I suggest you look up the definition of "troll," Coward.
Stalin was ready to land in Hokkaido in early September, long before the US could attempt an invasion.
Using what for a Navy? What landing craft and what supporting aircraft carriers and naval gunfire ships? What freighters and tankers for a supply train? The Soviet Navy in its entirety in June 1941 counted zero aircraft carriers, 2 battleships of 1909 design, 2 cruisers, 25 destroyers, 7 escort vessels, and 68 submarines. It hadn't grown much by August 1945, save in destroyers and submarines. I can't locate any evidence that they had any ocean capable landing craft at all. They most definitely had zero experience with mounting a seaborne invasion.
The US Navy on 14 August 1945 counted 28 fleet aircraft carriers, 71 light and escort aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, 361 frigates and destroyer escorts, 232 submarines; 6768 total vessels, including thousands of landing craft.
As others have noted, the Soviets could have savaged the Japanese army in Manchuria, but mounted an invasion of an island nation of around 100 million people? Not in anyone's dreams. Not for a long, long time after 1945. They had a large submarine force which could have choked off Japanese imports, but US submarines and other naval craft and airplanes had already done that. And none of this is to say that after annihilating Japanese forces in Manchuria, the Soviets might not have offered surrender terms which the Japanese would have accepted, particularly in light of US forces choking off all trade and imports.
The true alternative to the nuclear bombing would never have been a fanciful Soviet invasion of the home islands. It was the complete destruction of the Japanese Navy, merchant marine, and war-making industries which had already been virtually completed by the US by that time. Starvation and continued conventional aerial devastation would have been the only future the Japanese could look forward to. The loss of Japanese life even absent an invasion could have been catastrophic, completely dwarfing the losses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The losses to have been expected on both sides in the event of a US invasion have been extensively quoted, and there is no need to list them here.
I'm sure the French, who get essentially all their electric energy from nuclear, will be very interested to hear your idea that it is not worth the cost. The truth of the matter is that what Iran publicly claims makes absolute sense. It is just that their demented, medieval power structure does not inspire anyone with a level head to believe that they are not up to bad things.
Does Dell have the brain of a turkey? It can't seem to make up its corporate mind. Over the years, they're selling Ubuntu; now they're not; yes they are; no they're not; and on and on.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is more insightful than all the yapping brainwashed comments put together. I don't know if the U.S. was ever the best, but I do know it is now the worst. There is no difference between corporations and the evil gangs shown in Slumdog Millionaire taking advantage of small children and treating them worse than animals. Both exist for their own selfish, dog-eat-dog benefit without any regard whatsoever for the people who do the actual productive work. We have a government completely bought and paid for by these arrogant monsters. And the serfs cannot even imagine a life of freedom any more. There is nothing sadder than to see a serf embrace his serfdom and see it as natural.
Correctimundo, mon ami. Snopes.com has their typical glib treatment of this item which completely misses the point. Nowhere do they contest that the exam is in fact genuine. They prattle on about how the poor instructors and poor students today have to deal with courses which were absent in 1895. But they miss what is in fact the key consideration, which is that we have no idea what kind of curve they graded the exam on.
What is most instructive, however, remains: the questions asked were more difficult than what you find now. The CHALLENGE to the students' minds was greater.
And we have that little old item nagging at us: students in years past knew the difference between loose and lose. Even 10 years ago, students and graduates knew the difference much better than they do now.
My guess is that O.P.'s native language is English. I looked at a bunch of his posts, and he seems very fluent and adept. I think you will find O.P. is an example of a very intelligent and capable individual who is the product of a badly failed educational system (in this particular example, failed teaching of English language is noted). Hardly any memorization is taught any more. The rule that "oo" is pronounced as in "ooze" and "o" is pronounced as in "foe" is successfully taught, but the table of exceptions to the rule is not taught successfully at all. Judging by the results, it is not taught at all, or only very peremptorily. Geography and history are two other subjects the scope and quality of whose teaching has dropped to a very low ebb. I think you will find a far better quality of English teaching in India than in the U.S.
Admittedly we are both fixating on a single misspelling, but in the case of this particular single misspelling, what was for a great many years successfully taught, has in fairly recent years become almost universally not so. The word is misspelled almost as often as it is correctly spelled.
Check out the 8th grade final exam from 1895 from Salina, Kansas. This is just the grammar portion:
And a portion which was called "orthography:"
Even though the above does not much demonstrate very specific memorization, I believe it serves to make the point that standards have fallen very far. Not only could virtually no present day U.S. 8th grader pass that test, I submit few college seniors could; even those who major in journalism.
The geography section is also an eye opener:
But if you speed and do not brag about it, you're fine, right?
Thank you for taking the time for your critique. The only objection I reject out of hand is your last. The very thing part three addresses is the absurd, towering, unmanageable structure of laws we have now. If the tax code will not bear renewal, I applaud loudly. This 44,000 page monstrosity is grotesquely and insultingly absurd and a pernicious evil on the face of it. It could all be replaced by about 10 pages of rational legislation. The true danger is that stuff would still get renewed too easily. All that would be required would be a resolution that 218 reps and 51 senators approve, which could be as simple as "the entire tax code stands." This resolution would take a minute and a half to draft and about 10 minutes to vote on. It only starts to take time if enough legislators insist on debate. And that would be a Good thing.
By the way, you should realize that the Senate cannot initiate revenue bills, and in practice also never initiates expenditure and appropriation bills. The Constitution enforces the former, and the House has the practical ability to enforce the latter. These are the most pernicious routes of corruption, and my single term House proposal addresses this.
As for the rest, you say "nothing would ever get passed" as if that's a bad thing :-) And when you ask, who would bother with a single term, my reply is "not the greedy power-hungry sort we end up with now."
The systemic greed and corruption started considerably before the 1950s. Some would put it dating as far back as the oldest attempts at human government. It was certainly established in the US considerably before the 1950s. Watch the movies Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It's A Wonderful Life, and others. There were no contemporary movies of the post Civil War reconstruction era, but if there had been, they would have shown the problem rampant by then.
I will, however, agree that it has never been worse than the present.
The problem is indicative of a fundamental weakness of the design of the US representational system. Only a tiny percentage of voters would vote for an imaginary resolution that said "All incumbents are hereby deemed re-elected," but a huge percentage will vote to re-elect their own incumbent. What is productive on the small scale (more pork for MY district/state) is counterproductive on the large scale (more uncontrolled, disastrous pork for everybody). They are voting in what they perceive to be their own interest, and arguably they are not wrong if their own interest is self centered and not so much centered on the nation as a whole. And that cannot just be criticized as stupid. The only real proponent of self is always self, and family and friends come before all. We wouldn't be human if it were otherwise.
It is not an easy problem to solve. Term limits weed out experience and wisdom as well as arrogance and corruption, and as well, most proposals allow much too long a term of incumbency to do the slightest good. Nevertheless, I have the solution. It will of course require Constitutional amendment.
Part one. Limit membership in the House of Representatives to a SINGLE two year term. Leave the Senate unfettered by any limits. In fact, restore the method of choosing Senators to the original one of appointment by the governor (for 6 year terms just as now). Now you have the perfect Congress. The House is made over COMPLETELY fresh every two years; corruption never has a chance to take hold, no representative ever has to waste time and concentration on pursuing re-election rather than tending to governing, and you perpetually have that wonderful breath of fresh air that is the freshman class. On the other hand, the Senate fulfills what has always been its purpose: the repository of experience and wisdom. Senators likewise do not have to politic all the time, worrying about their re-election, since they are appointed.
You still have a democratic process, since no one can become a representative without being elected in the first place, and the governor in appointing the state's senators is answerable to the people, since he is popularly elected.
Part two: end the corrupt Congressional committee system which is at the root of corrupt legislation. Replace the committees by groups chosen from the general population including various appropriate professions. This mimics the proven jury system in the judicial branch. These groups will be freshly chosen every two years. No, it doesn't GUARANTEE that their fruits will be brilliant, but it does keep politics out of this critical process.
Part three: sunset EVERY bill. No exceptions.
The three part combination is the best possible solution. No hare brained bill can get passed without passing both houses, including the people's committees, and all bills die if not renewed. So-called "entitlements" cease unless they continually prove themselves and are constantly renewed. The system is self healing, since you can at any time get a fresh slate if everyone can't agree on the current system of laws, and they all sunset automatically. Of course, this extreme case will never happen, but it is the best guarantee against tyranny. The solution does not depend on the supposed adversarial relationship of the two parties, which has become illusory in the present general corruption. Rather, the solution is guaranteed by design.
Listen up. The post I originally replied to called the people liars for saying they paid $1500 for a Macbook. I demonstrated that you can easily pay $1500 - and in fact a whole lot more - for a Macbook. That's all. I didn't compare anything to anything. Prattle on if you must. ou're not proving anything.
All right. Listen up. First of all, you left out the drive. Pay attention. Who's the beotch now.
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC516LL/A?
MacBook $999
4GB RAM $100
500GB drive $150
iWork $49
Microsoft Office home and student $129.95
AppleCare $249
Total $1,676.95
I see you're using the academic login. How can I do that; I'm not a student. I clearly stated in the original post you can take the academic discount off the total. What do I find REALLY amusing? They're actually charging academics MORE for the RAM :-)
How do I know? I could name some reasons, and I'm tempted to do so, but the objection is silly. You want to change $1676.95 to $1627.95, delete iWork. Big deal. It doesn't change the point. Try to see the point.
I went to store.apple.com, checked the boxes, and noted the total. You should try it some time, Coward, before lecturing.
Stop calling them either liars or idiots. You are the one who is way off. Take a Macbook, expand it from 2GB to 4GB, change the 250GB drive to 500GB, add iWork, add Microsoft Office home and student edition, and add Applecare because now you've got quite a lot riding on a measly 1 year warranty. You're looking at $1676.95. And that's without Aperture, Logic Express, Final Cut, Filemaker, no DVI adapter, and no airline adapter. Just that stuff will take you up to $2491.90, and that's the CHEAP version of Filemaker.
So, $1500.00 is easily reached with the bottom of the line Macbook, even with a 15% discount.
You are a real intellectual marvel, Coward. You understand nothing, and you contribute nothing.
You're right. The guy is an a LOSER. He writes like a loser, he uses a loser's operating system, and he doesn't know shit technically. He symbolizes the problem perfectly.
Incorrect. Linux will "never" have ZFS.
Huh, a music CD is a sequence of digitally encoded sectors, one after the other, with error detection and correction. Ripping it to disk files, computer performance should be TOTALLY IRRELEVANT on the face of it. Maybe if you used a half decent ripping tool ... CDDA Paranoia . Of course, that tool only runs on a real operating system ... linux.
1) The aircraft carriers are to project ground attack aircraft onto the beach during the invasion. You need them on site, not airfields hundreds of miles away. I can't think of a successful amphibious invasion that didn't involve heavy air superiority from very close to the beach.
2) I can't find Soviet naval strength in 1945 anywhere. What I could find was the figures for 1941, and some fragmentary information indicating they hadn't built many ships at all larger than destroyers in the interrim.
3) Japanese naval resources in 1945 were all but destroyed. They did have plenty of ground aircraft left, though, including kamikazes, and plenty of land based artillery. There did not need to be a naval battle; there needed to be an almighty air and gunfire support of the invasion, and that would have taken a gigantic naval force on the assaulting side.
4) The Soviets had zero experience with mounting seaborne invasions and as far as I can tell they had no landing craft.
It's not that the Soviets could never have invaded Japan, it's that the idea of them doing it in August 1945 or any time in 1945 or even 1946 is pure fantasy.
I will take your judgement under advisement. You may have better information. But shall we make a little bet?
I knew it was a mistake not to put a sniper bullet in this bird's brain the first day he started kicking up a holy hell of a fuss.
Well, if the carnage remains or intensifies after this month, that will show that it is not about the foreign invaders and never was. It's about embracing the 13th century over the 21st century that the real world is living in.
Oh, and here's what we end up with for our efforts and our dead. Muqtada al-Sadr, the influential Iranian supported insane religious nut hate monger, is withdrawing his so-called "support" for the current Nouri al-Maliki compromise government. We will have exchanged a fairly dangerous hateful sectarian dictatorship for an extremely dangerous hateful totalitarian religious madhouse insanity like the ones in Iran and other such hellholes. You remember, the general type of scum who were actually behind 9-11. Not the Iraqis as they were.
The US has had a long sequence of stupid and ineffectual presidents with little substantive difference between the two sides of the aisle. And so it continues.
Well, there is at least one dumbfuck stupidass respondent, anyway, Coward.
You do understand that one man's "troll" is another man's refusal to tolerate incompetence and sloppiness? I suggest you look up the definition of "troll," Coward.
Using what for a Navy? What landing craft and what supporting aircraft carriers and naval gunfire ships? What freighters and tankers for a supply train? The Soviet Navy in its entirety in June 1941 counted zero aircraft carriers, 2 battleships of 1909 design, 2 cruisers, 25 destroyers, 7 escort vessels, and 68 submarines. It hadn't grown much by August 1945, save in destroyers and submarines. I can't locate any evidence that they had any ocean capable landing craft at all. They most definitely had zero experience with mounting a seaborne invasion.
The US Navy on 14 August 1945 counted 28 fleet aircraft carriers, 71 light and escort aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, 361 frigates and destroyer escorts, 232 submarines; 6768 total vessels, including thousands of landing craft.
As others have noted, the Soviets could have savaged the Japanese army in Manchuria, but mounted an invasion of an island nation of around 100 million people? Not in anyone's dreams. Not for a long, long time after 1945. They had a large submarine force which could have choked off Japanese imports, but US submarines and other naval craft and airplanes had already done that. And none of this is to say that after annihilating Japanese forces in Manchuria, the Soviets might not have offered surrender terms which the Japanese would have accepted, particularly in light of US forces choking off all trade and imports.
The true alternative to the nuclear bombing would never have been a fanciful Soviet invasion of the home islands. It was the complete destruction of the Japanese Navy, merchant marine, and war-making industries which had already been virtually completed by the US by that time. Starvation and continued conventional aerial devastation would have been the only future the Japanese could look forward to. The loss of Japanese life even absent an invasion could have been catastrophic, completely dwarfing the losses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The losses to have been expected on both sides in the event of a US invasion have been extensively quoted, and there is no need to list them here.
I'm sure the French, who get essentially all their electric energy from nuclear, will be very interested to hear your idea that it is not worth the cost. The truth of the matter is that what Iran publicly claims makes absolute sense. It is just that their demented, medieval power structure does not inspire anyone with a level head to believe that they are not up to bad things.
Can't anybody design any piece of hardware or software that does not have some lame vulnerability?
Could you clarify for me exactly what that sentence is trying to say?
Does Dell have the brain of a turkey? It can't seem to make up its corporate mind. Over the years, they're selling Ubuntu; now they're not; yes they are; no they're not; and on and on.