Well...most of the population do not live in rural areas. If we could get people who live in cities to switch, that would cover most of our oil consumption right there.
Insurance by the mile for each car seems like a better solution. I mean, somebody driving a Mercedes poses a higher actuarial cost then someone driving a volvo, and so insuring by the license doesn't seem fair. Not only that, but since risk of an accident is pretty much directly proportional to miles driven, it seems superior to the status quo anyway. It also does facilitate owning multiple vehicles.
The only issue is that they require a special tracking device on the car. This is something that doesn't really bother me, since the police have access to my location via cell phone records anyway. But it seems like the kind of thing that would piss certain people off...
AT&T has a Go-Phone service without a contract. Granted, it's pricey - ($1 at 20 cents per minute or $3 a day for unlimited minutes), but it's there...
The fact that it costs so much is the point. Gift exchange serves a valuable purpose in ensuring cooperation, because it serves to make declarations of intention credible.
In this case, consider a guy who wants to tell his girlfriend "I love you and do not plan to leave you or be unfaithful". That's easy for a guy to say, and it often provides a lot of benefits if believed, so it can be rational for a guy to say this whether it's rational or not. And the girl, knowing this, might not have reason to trust him. This isn't good for either party. So instead, the guy spends a huge sum of money on a worthless trinket and gives it to her. If he truly planned to leave, then he wouldn't have spent the huge amount of money, and so suddenly, the girl(or historically, the girl's family) has reason to trust him. Win/win for both sides.
This is why pretty much every culture in history has had some form of "spend huge sums of money on Marriage traditions". In our case, we spend tons of money on diamond rings and expensive weddings.
More deeply, this is what's going on subconsciously whenever friends exchange gifts with each other. Think of it as the way society evolves to get around the prisoner's dilemma.
Easily attributable to the Democratic politicans being better at siphoning the federal pork.
1) Using http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_pigbook2008porkpercap as a source, an anti-spending organisation that most would consider right-wing as a source, some quick math (email me and I'd be glad to send you, otherwise, import it into excel...): The average pork per capita is $46.30 in states won by Obama, and $88 in states won by McCain. That's a 90% difference.
2) Of course, pork spending is a miniscule portion of the federal budget. Let's look at overall federal spending: The Tax Foundation, another anti-tax group, has data at http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html . Plugging this into excel and comparing with election08 data (Feel free to email me asking for the data if you don't trust me), the average Blue state gets $0.96 in spending for every dollar it pays in taxes. The average Red state receives $1.40 in spending for every dollar in taxes it pays.
If anything, it seems like it's the Republican politicians are "better at siphoning the federal pork." !
Per person?
Per person, things are pretty much the same. Weighing population, you get that Blue states receive 96 cents in spending for every dollar they pay in taxes, while Red states receive $1.27 in spending for every dollar they pay in taxes.
enough, you can come to rather dire conclusions just about anything you (pre)set your mind to.
Not in this case. Under pretty much every conceivable metric, Blue states perform better then Red States. This is, at heart, because Blue states have lots of cities, while Red states tend to be rural. Cities are much richer then rural areas, and money tends to fix social and economic problems. There's a good argument to be made that this has nothing to do with governance, but the data is what it is.
As for your claim that Democrats benefit from having republican predecessors: There is a good deal of evidence that vote margins can be very accurately predicted on the basis of economic performance (See the "Bread and Peace" model published by Hibbs(2005)). If Democrats gain power from Republicans, this implies that the Republicans must have done very badly. Since there are more Democrats then Republicans at every level of government right now, this creates a strong theoretical reason to believe that Republicans do not perform better then Democrats. Because of this strong theoretical basis, the burden of proof is on you to prove otherwise, preferably with a lot of data.
"Even a 60% crop wouldn't cause a famine in Florida... As for your being part of a large country, that's irrelevant, because you didn't get food as charity from the government — you paid for (most) it, with industrious, profit-driven capitalists in a hurry to deliver supplies in exchange for money. If Nicaragua had any of that (instead of living harvest-to-harvest) — they would've been able to absorb an occasional hurricane too."
Having lived through a bunch of Hurricanes, I'd say that without the massive federal assistance Florida gets after a bad Hurricane, famine-like conditions would be a strong possibility. It's hard for "industrious profit driven capitalists" to get food when they can't leave their houses without being electrocuted to death by downed power-lines.
All of these things require lots of money, and you're right, if Nicaragua was richer, there wouldn't be any problems. But Nicaragua's GDP is higher right now then it was a couple years ago when they w
To sum up the data: Per Capita Income in "Blue" states is 20% higher then in Red States and Graduation rates are 5.4% higher. Violent and Property crime are 11.1% and 10.1% higher respectively in states controlled by Republican Legislatures. In terms of taxation, "Blue" States overwhelmingly pay far more in taxes then they receive in federal outlays, with the money going to "Red" states. Interestingly, under pretty much every measure of administrative efficiency, Democratic governments do better then Republican ones, by a sizeable margin.
Brush it off as the price of hedonist sin? 9 out of 10 of the states with the lowest divorce rates are blue states, while all 10 out of 10 of the top 10 states are red states. All of the top 16 states with the highest abortion rates voted for Bush, while 9 out of 10 of the states with the lowest rates voted for Kerry.
Unlike you, I'm not going to be a dick and assume Correlation-->Causation, but for what it's worth, the evidence is on my side, not yours.
Other nitpicks:
1) When my home state, Florida, got hit by Hurricanes in 2004, crop yields fell by 40%. But unlike Nicaragua, we were part of a large country, most of which was not hit by a Hurricane, that was able to carry us through for our eating needs. Nicaragua meanwhile, is roughly the size of Miami-Dade county. When it gets hit by a hurricane, the entire country gets hit. And so without importing food from elsewhere, famine is inevitable. It's a little inexplicable that this didn't occur to you in your analysis.
2) "There was no famine in New Orleans. There was a major break down in law and order and other failures of the local government."
Don't rewrite history. I remember when it took days and days for the government to get *anybody* to the Superdrome as 20,000 people were in dire need of food and water. We spend more on our military then literally every other country combined, but we couldn't air drop food and water onto a large stationary target on our territory? (And don't mention security. Our National Guard manages to run humanitarian efforts in Fallujah under heavy weapon fire). It was a terrible display of incompetence, and voters saw it too, with the disaster triggering a huge structural decrease in Bush's approval ratings.
3) Unless the pre-Katrina government of New Orleans engaged in policies that nationalized the means of production, then calling them "Socialist" makes you look like a dumbass.
Maple is a turing-complete programming language, so I suppose your statement is true. But the math used in finance is really quite complicated. Even in the introductory stuff like pricing american options, you start to see partial differential equations with non-trivial boundary conditions. Once you get closer to actual practice, you see really monsterous stuff like random field theory. It's not something your average mathematician could do without a bit of training
Price competition is a prisoners dilemma, so in the absense of collusion, prices should converge to marginal cost, see the Bertrand Model of competition. If "implicit" collusion(Unspoken agreements like you just described) is possible, that implies the need for either trustbusting or greater regulation.
In a functioning market, things that are essentially free to the tele-com industry at large (Roaming charges, SMS, etc) would become free to consumers. This has not happened, which suggests that there is a significant amount of collusion out there.
"See, that's where your wrong. It won't eat into their profits. They'll just raise prices for everybody and I'll wind up subsidizing the SMS usage of the teenagers down the street."
This really should not be the case. Competition should drive profits just above zero. If you think that profits would be this persistent, then these companies are exercising market power in ways that are detrimental to the economy.
"They charge that because idiots like you are willing to pay for it. Evidently you regard SMS as important enough to pay $5 for 100 messages. The fact that it doesn't cost them that much is irrelevant. They are charging what the market will bear. If you think it's overpriced then stop paying for it."
In competitive markets, price converges to marginal cost. Period. "What the market will bare", or what economists call price-elasticity, is only relevant in monopolistic markets. For example, I would be willing to "bare" paying all of my income for food, because otherwise I would die. But due to competition, prices are much much lower.
The marginal cost of an SMS message is essentially zero, so their persistent high price strongly suggests some sort of collusion on the part of the cellular carriers.
On the contrary, a set can have measure 0 and be non-empty...(What is the probability of selecting a prime number over the set of integers? Surely there exist primes...)
If you catch some weird disease, the CDC has the right to quarantine your ass. The government forces people to get vaccinations as well.
So why are economically damaging computer viruses spreading through the internet less deserving of government action than real viruses spreading through social networks?
I can see a lot of arguments for the reverse, namely that a single computer can infect far more machines than a single person can infect other people...
Yes, I'm sure they very well could. Such legislation would be retarded, but it would be constitutional...(Seriously, how is that any different than how we're required to buy cars with catalytic converters?)
After all, congress has the power to mandate that people *die* for national security(See the draft). You seriously think that your freedom to use your computer without anti-virus software would be upheld?
Eh, I find this kind of argument odd and a little disingenuous. Chances are, you don't actually care whether or not this proposed program would be constitutional, you just think it shouldn't be done.
After all, wouldn't "The program proposed would be beneficial for our country, is a wise use of federal funds, and would command broad public support. But we shouldn't do it because some long dead people from the 18th century think otherwise" be a little strange?
Sorry, I don't see why what the founding fathers thought the fed's "should" be doing 300 years ago should outrank what the majority of citizens TODAY want the federal government to do.
I understand the argument of constitutionalism for certain things, like freedom of speech or protection of minorities, on the argument that the majority might get temporarily inflamed and do something terrible.
But persistent majorities for the last century have voted on a large and expansive government. It seems wrong to advocate their disenfranchisement.
The strategy for both the ANC and the ZANU-PF was pretty clear: Force the minority governments to engage in heavy-handed suppression measures that eventually lead to popular uprising by the majority.
At the same time, this suppression lead to the sympathy from the media that you described.
As for the ELPF, that was something pure and simple. The international community, despite repeated pleas, refused to support the cause of Eritrean independence.
So they formed a militia and bled the Ethiopians to death until they relented.
To be honest, it's very difficult to think of any successful independence movement in the last century that didn't rely on terrorism.
And moreover, I can't think of a single successful independence movement that relied on the media tactics you suggest. Just ask Tibet.
Eh, terrorism seems to be rather effective to me. At least in certain situations.
After all, the ANC's terror attacks against the apartheid regime in South Africa worked, as did the ZANU-PF campaign against Ian Smith's white government in Zimbabwe. The ELPF eventualy managed to secure independence for Eritrea from Ethiopia.
I could go on like this for a long time. Seems like it has a success rate much higher than 0...
"The only way to defend against an all-out nuclear attack is to make sure YOU can retaliate (if they can destroy every one of your nuclear launch sites, you're in a bit of trouble). And the best way to do that is to make as many launch sites as possible - the more launch sites you have, the more difficult it is to destroy every one of them in one fell swoop"
Most nuclear weapons were built before missile technology was well developed. This made a lot of sense, since bombs had to be delivered by bombers, and most bombers would be destroyed before they reached their targets. The development of truly effective ICBMs and Nuclear Submarines destroyed the rationale for such large nuclear stockpiles, and both Russia and the US have been trying to negotiate arms reduction agreements ever since then.
Today, this kind of thinking doesn't make much sense. Today, preventing a 'second strike' response is no longer a matter of shooting down a bunch of incoming bombers. One would have to destroy every enemy launch site and submarine within about five minutes. Keep in mind, nuclear missile silo's are often embedded in train cars, traveling discretely across the country at any given time. Even if there were only 10 submarines and silos altogether, this would be impossible or extremely unlikely.
And remember, you don't actually need to put a nuke in every submarine or silo. You could produce hundreds or thousands of "duds" and arm a huge number of silos with them. The enemy would waste most of the firepower on destroying the duds, and the real nukes would slip through.
'Limiting countries to 10 nukes each means they'll either circumvent the rule and have unmatched superiority (split their lands and install puppet governments, or lie about the number of nukes, etc)'
I didn't propose limiting countries to 10 nukes each, I proposed limiting each great power with 10 nukes each. Realistically, these are the countries who already have nukes(Hopefully we could claw them back from North Korea), and extend some sort of plausible defensive umbrella out to the rest.
I don't see why a country would claim to have less nukes than they actually did. If anything, I'd expect the opposite(I personally suspect that both the US and Russia have a lot less functional nuclear weapons than they claim).
And I really don't see the marginal value of an extra nuke after 10 for someone planning a first strike. Once you launch a nuke, it's going to successfully hit the target(anti-missile defense is bullshit against advanced missiles). You can effectively immobilize any military with 10 nukes.
And remember, preventing second-strike capability does not require nukes. Missile Silos can be temporarily disabled with conventional weapons, as can submarines.
'or that someone crazy will risk an attack regardless and deal with the devastation of 10 (or less) nuclear strikes (countries with large land masses could do it - we're looking at you, Russia)'
There is no country that could deal with the complete devastation from 10 thermonuclear warheads(especially if combined with a conventional weapons strike). Logistics networks would simply shutdown, and it seems rather likely to me that the military would mutiny at that point. Like before, the marginal destructiveness of nukes falls off pretty quickly.
Of course there are sometimes crazy leaders, but I doubt the generals would allow a crazy man to allow a first strike. Recall that the Russian generals formed an agreement not to follow any nuclear launch order while the Soviet Union was collapsing.
"since the invention of the nuclear bomb, (despite forcing the world to live in constant fear) there has never actually been direct warfare between two nuclear-armed nations"
This isn't true. China and Russia had a serious skirmish in the 60's over an island on the border. More recently, India and Pakistan fought the Kargil war only a decade ago. And nuclear armed countries get invaded all the time(Israel in 67 and 73, the UK during the Falklands war,...). Deterrence isn't very useful, because "I'm going to nuke and invite certain destruction unless you withdraw from Kasmir" isn't a credible threat.
It's not fear mongering, it's basic understanding of expected utility. The gains from producing plutonium and highly-enriched uranium are... not very high(Slightly more efficient nuclear power plants, and maybe some of these odd-ball "use nukes to dig tunnel" ideas).
On the other hand, the mere *presence* of these materials leave open the chance that one day, some whackjob or terror group is going to get a hold of one, and proceed to kill millions of people. Worse, there could be a misunderstanding or technical error, as has happened already, that ends up triggering nuclear war, killing most of the human race.
It really is imperative that we do everything we can to cut down the number of nukes to as small a number as possible(I don't see why 10 nuclear weapons per world power isn't enough for effective deterrence), and guard them extremely closely.
Conventional explosives have problems too. They work via chemical reactions, and pretty bizarre ones at that. The mushroom cloud ends up containing all sorts of super-toxic chemicals.
There do exist ways to decrease nuclear fallout, and it's actually fairly plausible that we might be able to do this to a point where it's environmentally superior to conventional explosives. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that tends to be heavily classified, so I don't know how far along we've come with this.
It's been a while since I've read up on the subject, but if I remember correctly, it's "Fission=bad and fusion=good" so far as radioactivity is concerned, and that the main source of radio-activity in H-bombs are the fission reactions used as a trigger. This is because Uranium fission produces a bunch of long-lived and heavy radioactive elements, while H-H reactions mainly just produces a lot of energy, and the radioactive byproducts(hydrogen and lithium isotopes), mostly float out into space.
But I'd love to hear some physicists comment here.
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Well...most of the population do not live in rural areas. If we could get people who live in cities to switch, that would cover most of our oil consumption right there.
The only issue is that they require a special tracking device on the car. This is something that doesn't really bother me, since the police have access to my location via cell phone records anyway. But it seems like the kind of thing that would piss certain people off...
AT&T has a Go-Phone service without a contract. Granted, it's pricey - ($1 at 20 cents per minute or $3 a day for unlimited minutes), but it's there...
In this case, consider a guy who wants to tell his girlfriend "I love you and do not plan to leave you or be unfaithful". That's easy for a guy to say, and it often provides a lot of benefits if believed, so it can be rational for a guy to say this whether it's rational or not. And the girl, knowing this, might not have reason to trust him. This isn't good for either party. So instead, the guy spends a huge sum of money on a worthless trinket and gives it to her. If he truly planned to leave, then he wouldn't have spent the huge amount of money, and so suddenly, the girl(or historically, the girl's family) has reason to trust him. Win/win for both sides.
This is why pretty much every culture in history has had some form of "spend huge sums of money on Marriage traditions". In our case, we spend tons of money on diamond rings and expensive weddings.
More deeply, this is what's going on subconsciously whenever friends exchange gifts with each other. Think of it as the way society evolves to get around the prisoner's dilemma.
1) Using http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_pigbook2008porkpercap as a source, an anti-spending organisation that most would consider right-wing as a source, some quick math (email me and I'd be glad to send you, otherwise, import it into excel...): The average pork per capita is $46.30 in states won by Obama, and $88 in states won by McCain. That's a 90% difference.
2) Of course, pork spending is a miniscule portion of the federal budget. Let's look at overall federal spending: The Tax Foundation, another anti-tax group, has data at http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html . Plugging this into excel and comparing with election08 data (Feel free to email me asking for the data if you don't trust me), the average Blue state gets $0.96 in spending for every dollar it pays in taxes. The average Red state receives $1.40 in spending for every dollar in taxes it pays.
These figures include essentially all types of federal spending: Defence, Welfare, Medicaid, etc. You can read more about the methodology at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_spending_and_taxation_across_states.
If anything, it seems like it's the Republican politicians are "better at siphoning the federal pork." !
Per person?
Per person, things are pretty much the same. Weighing population, you get that Blue states receive 96 cents in spending for every dollar they pay in taxes, while Red states receive $1.27 in spending for every dollar they pay in taxes.
enough, you can come to rather dire conclusions just about anything you (pre)set your mind to.
Not in this case. Under pretty much every conceivable metric, Blue states perform better then Red States. This is, at heart, because Blue states have lots of cities, while Red states tend to be rural. Cities are much richer then rural areas, and money tends to fix social and economic problems. There's a good argument to be made that this has nothing to do with governance, but the data is what it is.
As for your claim that Democrats benefit from having republican predecessors: There is a good deal of evidence that vote margins can be very accurately predicted on the basis of economic performance (See the "Bread and Peace" model published by Hibbs(2005)). If Democrats gain power from Republicans, this implies that the Republicans must have done very badly. Since there are more Democrats then Republicans at every level of government right now, this creates a strong theoretical reason to believe that Republicans do not perform better then Democrats. Because of this strong theoretical basis, the burden of proof is on you to prove otherwise, preferably with a lot of data.
"Even a 60% crop wouldn't cause a famine in Florida... As for your being part of a large country, that's irrelevant, because you didn't get food as charity from the government — you paid for (most) it, with industrious, profit-driven capitalists in a hurry to deliver supplies in exchange for money. If Nicaragua had any of that (instead of living harvest-to-harvest) — they would've been able to absorb an occasional hurricane too."
Having lived through a bunch of Hurricanes, I'd say that without the massive federal assistance Florida gets after a bad Hurricane, famine-like conditions would be a strong possibility. It's hard for "industrious profit driven capitalists" to get food when they can't leave their houses without being electrocuted to death by downed power-lines.
All of these things require lots of money, and you're right, if Nicaragua was richer, there wouldn't be any problems. But Nicaragua's GDP is higher right now then it was a couple years ago when they w
To sum up the data: Per Capita Income in "Blue" states is 20% higher then in Red States and Graduation rates are 5.4% higher. Violent and Property crime are 11.1% and 10.1% higher respectively in states controlled by Republican Legislatures. In terms of taxation, "Blue" States overwhelmingly pay far more in taxes then they receive in federal outlays, with the money going to "Red" states. Interestingly, under pretty much every measure of administrative efficiency, Democratic governments do better then Republican ones, by a sizeable margin.
Brush it off as the price of hedonist sin? 9 out of 10 of the states with the lowest divorce rates are blue states, while all 10 out of 10 of the top 10 states are red states. All of the top 16 states with the highest abortion rates voted for Bush, while 9 out of 10 of the states with the lowest rates voted for Kerry.
Unlike you, I'm not going to be a dick and assume Correlation-->Causation, but for what it's worth, the evidence is on my side, not yours.
Other nitpicks:
1) When my home state, Florida, got hit by Hurricanes in 2004, crop yields fell by 40%. But unlike Nicaragua, we were part of a large country, most of which was not hit by a Hurricane, that was able to carry us through for our eating needs. Nicaragua meanwhile, is roughly the size of Miami-Dade county. When it gets hit by a hurricane, the entire country gets hit. And so without importing food from elsewhere, famine is inevitable. It's a little inexplicable that this didn't occur to you in your analysis.
2) "There was no famine in New Orleans. There was a major break down in law and order and other failures of the local government."
Don't rewrite history. I remember when it took days and days for the government to get *anybody* to the Superdrome as 20,000 people were in dire need of food and water. We spend more on our military then literally every other country combined, but we couldn't air drop food and water onto a large stationary target on our territory? (And don't mention security. Our National Guard manages to run humanitarian efforts in Fallujah under heavy weapon fire). It was a terrible display of incompetence, and voters saw it too, with the disaster triggering a huge structural decrease in Bush's approval ratings.
3) Unless the pre-Katrina government of New Orleans engaged in policies that nationalized the means of production, then calling them "Socialist" makes you look like a dumbass.
Maple is a turing-complete programming language, so I suppose your statement is true. But the math used in finance is really quite complicated. Even in the introductory stuff like pricing american options, you start to see partial differential equations with non-trivial boundary conditions. Once you get closer to actual practice, you see really monsterous stuff like random field theory. It's not something your average mathematician could do without a bit of training
Price competition is a prisoners dilemma, so in the absense of collusion, prices should converge to marginal cost, see the Bertrand Model of competition. If "implicit" collusion(Unspoken agreements like you just described) is possible, that implies the need for either trustbusting or greater regulation.
In a functioning market, things that are essentially free to the tele-com industry at large (Roaming charges, SMS, etc) would become free to consumers. This has not happened, which suggests that there is a significant amount of collusion out there.
This really should not be the case. Competition should drive profits just above zero. If you think that profits would be this persistent, then these companies are exercising market power in ways that are detrimental to the economy.
In competitive markets, price converges to marginal cost. Period. "What the market will bare", or what economists call price-elasticity, is only relevant in monopolistic markets. For example, I would be willing to "bare" paying all of my income for food, because otherwise I would die. But due to competition, prices are much much lower.
The marginal cost of an SMS message is essentially zero, so their persistent high price strongly suggests some sort of collusion on the part of the cellular carriers.
Several thousand people a year have visited North Korea. It really is a terrible place, don't delusion yourself.
Not that I disagree with you, but that isn't a sufficient condition. "Free nuclear weapons for all!" would indeed make dictatorships difficult...
On the contrary, a set can have measure 0 and be non-empty...(What is the probability of selecting a prime number over the set of integers? Surely there exist primes...)
The set of primes that do not end with one has measure zero :p
You should see Category Theory, "Well, a morphism is when you've got some things, and then you end up with some stuff...."
If you catch some weird disease, the CDC has the right to quarantine your ass. The government forces people to get vaccinations as well.
So why are economically damaging computer viruses spreading through the internet less deserving of government action than real viruses spreading through social networks?
I can see a lot of arguments for the reverse, namely that a single computer can infect far more machines than a single person can infect other people...
After all, congress has the power to mandate that people *die* for national security(See the draft). You seriously think that your freedom to use your computer without anti-virus software would be upheld?
After all, wouldn't "The program proposed would be beneficial for our country, is a wise use of federal funds, and would command broad public support. But we shouldn't do it because some long dead people from the 18th century think otherwise" be a little strange?
I understand the argument of constitutionalism for certain things, like freedom of speech or protection of minorities, on the argument that the majority might get temporarily inflamed and do something terrible.
But persistent majorities for the last century have voted on a large and expansive government. It seems wrong to advocate their disenfranchisement.
The strategy for both the ANC and the ZANU-PF was pretty clear: Force the minority governments to engage in heavy-handed suppression measures that eventually lead to popular uprising by the majority.
At the same time, this suppression lead to the sympathy from the media that you described.
As for the ELPF, that was something pure and simple. The international community, despite repeated pleas, refused to support the cause of Eritrean independence.
So they formed a militia and bled the Ethiopians to death until they relented.
To be honest, it's very difficult to think of any successful independence movement in the last century that didn't rely on terrorism.
And moreover, I can't think of a single successful independence movement that relied on the media tactics you suggest. Just ask Tibet.
After all, the ANC's terror attacks against the apartheid regime in South Africa worked, as did the ZANU-PF campaign against Ian Smith's white government in Zimbabwe. The ELPF eventualy managed to secure independence for Eritrea from Ethiopia.
I could go on like this for a long time. Seems like it has a success rate much higher than 0...
"The only way to defend against an all-out nuclear attack is to make sure YOU can retaliate (if they can destroy every one of your nuclear launch sites, you're in a bit of trouble). And the best way to do that is to make as many launch sites as possible - the more launch sites you have, the more difficult it is to destroy every one of them in one fell swoop"
Most nuclear weapons were built before missile technology was well developed. This made a lot of sense, since bombs had to be delivered by bombers, and most bombers would be destroyed before they reached their targets. The development of truly effective ICBMs and Nuclear Submarines destroyed the rationale for such large nuclear stockpiles, and both Russia and the US have been trying to negotiate arms reduction agreements ever since then.
Today, this kind of thinking doesn't make much sense. Today, preventing a 'second strike' response is no longer a matter of shooting down a bunch of incoming bombers. One would have to destroy every enemy launch site and submarine within about five minutes. Keep in mind, nuclear missile silo's are often embedded in train cars, traveling discretely across the country at any given time. Even if there were only 10 submarines and silos altogether, this would be impossible or extremely unlikely.
And remember, you don't actually need to put a nuke in every submarine or silo. You could produce hundreds or thousands of "duds" and arm a huge number of silos with them. The enemy would waste most of the firepower on destroying the duds, and the real nukes would slip through.
'Limiting countries to 10 nukes each means they'll either circumvent the rule and have unmatched superiority (split their lands and install puppet governments, or lie about the number of nukes, etc)'
I didn't propose limiting countries to 10 nukes each, I proposed limiting each great power with 10 nukes each. Realistically, these are the countries who already have nukes(Hopefully we could claw them back from North Korea), and extend some sort of plausible defensive umbrella out to the rest.
I don't see why a country would claim to have less nukes than they actually did. If anything, I'd expect the opposite(I personally suspect that both the US and Russia have a lot less functional nuclear weapons than they claim).
And I really don't see the marginal value of an extra nuke after 10 for someone planning a first strike. Once you launch a nuke, it's going to successfully hit the target(anti-missile defense is bullshit against advanced missiles). You can effectively immobilize any military with 10 nukes.
And remember, preventing second-strike capability does not require nukes. Missile Silos can be temporarily disabled with conventional weapons, as can submarines.
'or that someone crazy will risk an attack regardless and deal with the devastation of 10 (or less) nuclear strikes (countries with large land masses could do it - we're looking at you, Russia)'
There is no country that could deal with the complete devastation from 10 thermonuclear warheads(especially if combined with a conventional weapons strike). Logistics networks would simply shutdown, and it seems rather likely to me that the military would mutiny at that point. Like before, the marginal destructiveness of nukes falls off pretty quickly.
Of course there are sometimes crazy leaders, but I doubt the generals would allow a crazy man to allow a first strike. Recall that the Russian generals formed an agreement not to follow any nuclear launch order while the Soviet Union was collapsing.
"since the invention of the nuclear bomb, (despite forcing the world to live in constant fear) there has never actually been direct warfare between two nuclear-armed nations"
This isn't true. China and Russia had a serious skirmish in the 60's over an island on the border. More recently, India and Pakistan fought the Kargil war only a decade ago. And nuclear armed countries get invaded all the time(Israel in 67 and 73, the UK during the Falklands war, ...). Deterrence isn't very useful, because "I'm going to nuke and invite certain destruction unless you withdraw from Kasmir" isn't a credible threat.
"Fearmongering will get us nowhere."
It's not fear mongering, it's basic understanding of expected utility. The gains from producing plutonium and highly-enriched uranium are... not very high(Slightly more efficient nuclear power plants, and maybe some of these odd-ball "use nukes to dig tunnel" ideas).
On the other hand, the mere *presence* of these materials leave open the chance that one day, some whackjob or terror group is going to get a hold of one, and proceed to kill millions of people. Worse, there could be a misunderstanding or technical error, as has happened already, that ends up triggering nuclear war, killing most of the human race.
It really is imperative that we do everything we can to cut down the number of nukes to as small a number as possible(I don't see why 10 nuclear weapons per world power isn't enough for effective deterrence), and guard them extremely closely.
There do exist ways to decrease nuclear fallout, and it's actually fairly plausible that we might be able to do this to a point where it's environmentally superior to conventional explosives. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that tends to be heavily classified, so I don't know how far along we've come with this.
It's been a while since I've read up on the subject, but if I remember correctly, it's "Fission=bad and fusion=good" so far as radioactivity is concerned, and that the main source of radio-activity in H-bombs are the fission reactions used as a trigger. This is because Uranium fission produces a bunch of long-lived and heavy radioactive elements, while H-H reactions mainly just produces a lot of energy, and the radioactive byproducts(hydrogen and lithium isotopes), mostly float out into space.
But I'd love to hear some physicists comment here.